AMIA News

High School Students Present
at National Informatics Symposium

AMIA chose 10 high school students who worked on research projects with faculty mentors from across the country to present at its annual symposium, held November 14-18 in San Francisco. AMIA launched the high school development program in 2014 to encourage interest in the growing field of biomedical informatics. Five students were chosen for oral presentations and five students were chosen for poster presentations.

The symposium draws 2,500 attendees for an event featuring more than 600 papers, panels, and posters. The High School Scholars Program provides an opportunity for high school students to present their research activities. All submissions were peer reviewed by members of the AMIA 2015 Scientific Program Committee and additional researchers. The symposium included educational activities and networking events for high school students and high school teachers participating in educational and research partnerships with biomedical informatics researchers across the United States.

The program is organized by Neil Sarkar, PhD, MLIS, of Brown University; Kim Unertl, PhD, MS, of Vanderbilt University; and John T. Finnell, MD, MSc, of the Regenstrief Institute.

“As we move into the second year of the AMIA High School Scholars Program, we are excited to expand the program to include more students,” Unertl says. “Being able to present at a major scientific meeting allows these students to showcase the exceptional work they’ve done with guidance from faculty mentors.”

High School Student Oral Presenters

• “Efficient Unsupervised Feature Selection for EMR Phenotyping” by Fiona Cai of Stuyvesant High School, with Katherine P. Liao of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Jessica Minnier of Oregon Health & Science University, and Sheng Yu of Tsinghua University.
• “Comparison of Query Performance of a Research Data Warehouse Stored in a Relational Star Schema Database vs in a NoSQL Document-Store Database” by Mit Patel of Absegami High School, with Bill Shirey of University of Pittsburgh.
• “Convolutional Neural Networks for Identifying Transcription Factor Binding Motifs” by Lukas Schmit of Winchester Thurston High School, with Joyetta Dutta-Moscato and Xinghua Lu of University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute.
• “Panoptiq Imaging System Compared with Whole Slide Imaging (WSI) for Challenging Pathology Cases” by Kahmil Shajihan of Sewickley Academy, with Sara E. Monaco, Ishtiaque Ahmed, Jon Duboy, and Liron Pantanowitz of University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
• “Relationship of IT Sophistication to Quality Measures in a National Study of Nursing Homes” by Brooke Striegel of Lighthouse Preparatory Academy, with Gregory L. Alexander of Sinclair School of Nursing at University of Missouri.

High School Student Poster Presenters

• “BioTurk: Crowd Verification of the Construction and Augmentation of Biological Pathways” by Rachel Hong of The Bishop’s School, with Sasha Koruga, Victoria Yao, Alicja Tadych, Young-suk Lee, Arjun Krishnan, and Olga Troyanskaya of Princeton University; Aaron Wong of Simons Foundation; Nesanet Mitiku of Mount Sinai Hospital; and Sepandar Kamvar of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
• “Information Seeking Behaviors of Pregnant Women and Their Caregivers: Technology Usage and Preferences” by Hannah Huth of The Harpeth Hall School, with Gretchen P. Jackson and Shilo H. Anders of Vanderbilt University.
• “Methodology for Cross Talk of Pathways: Case Study EGFR Pathway in Breast Cancer” by Zeba Kokan of Park Tudor High School, with Meeta Pradhan and Mathew Palakal of Indiana University—Purdue University Indianapolis.
• “Analyzing Workflow Patterns in Large Datasets: Exploring the Vanderbilt Outpatient Whiteboard” by Baridi L. Jackson of Martin Luther King Jr. Academic Magnet High School, with Bryan Steitz and Kim M. Unerti of Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
• “GWAS Variants in Asthma Susceptibility in African American Youth” by Oona Risse-Adams of Lowell High School, with Jennifer Adams of Stanford University; Marquitta White, Sam Oh, Esteban Burchard, Donglei Hu, Melissa Spear, Scott Huntsman, and Celeste Eng of University of California, San Francisco; and Page Goddard of UCLA.

— Source: AMIA