Noemie Elhadad
Associate Professor in Biomedical Informatics
Noémie Elhadad is an Associate Professor in Biomedical Informatics, affiliated with Computer Science at Columbia University. She is the Chair of the Health Analytics Center at the Columbia University Data Science Institute. Her research is in biomedical informatics, natural language processing, and data science. She develops techniques to support clinicians, patients, and health researchers in their information workflow by automatically extracting and making accessible information from large clinical datasets (e.g., the electronic patient record) and patient platforms (e.g., online health communities, and mobile apps). Her research relies on two types of methods: (1) she designs novel computational approaches that infer models of health phenomena and account for the specific biases of large health data; (2) she translates the learned models into actionable knowledge and robust systems within the healthcare ecosystem. Her work is funded primarily by NSF, NIGMS, NLM, and NCI.
Chintan Patel
Co-Founder, CTO and President
Chintan brings in more than 15 years experience as a Computer Scientist and Biomedical Informatician. At TrialX, he builds stuff with funny acronyms such as REST, API, JSON, JSX, RDF and so on. His areas of expertise include software architecture, semantic technologies, biomedical ontologies, machine learning and natural language processing. Previously, he worked at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research, on ontology-reasoning and information extraction that then became the infamous Jeopardy winning AI software “Watson”. He holds a Ph.D. in Biomedical Informatics from Columbia University.
Melanie Ariane Gold, DO
Professor of Pediatrics and Population & Family Health at CUMC
Medical Director of School Based Health Centers
Melanie A. Gold, DO was appointed the Medical Director of School Based Health Centers at Columbia University Medical Center and NY Presbyterian Hospital in August of 2014. She has a secondary appointment at Mailman School of Public Health. Dr. Gold was a Clinical Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, Division of Adolescent Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and in the Department of Behavioral and Community Health Sciences at the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh before coming to Columbia University. In addition, she served as staff physician at the University of Pittsburgh Student Health Service where she cared for college and graduate students from 2008 until 2014. Dr. Gold has maintained her sub-specialty certification in Adolescent Medicine by the American Board of Pediatrics since 1994 and she was a certified specialist in Pediatrics between 1992 and 2013. As a Motivational Interviewing Network Trainer since 2000. Dr. Gold has conducted numerous trainings in Motivational Interviewing (MI) and behavior change counseling in the health care setting with physicians, medical students, residents, fellows, nurses, nurse practitioners, physician’s assistants, health educators, dental students, psychologists, sports physiologists, social workers, and nutritionists. Dr. Gold has publications in peer-reviewed journals on MI and a variety of other adolescent health topics. Her research interests lie in the areas of adolescent sexuality, contraceptive behaviors, tobacco cessation in adolescents, and MI to facilitate health behavior change. Dr. Gold has expertise is several areas of alternative and complementary medicine. For nearly 20 years, she has been teaching patients and health care professionals medical hypnosis. In June 2013, she passed her board certification examination in Medical Acupuncture and has been a Reiki Master since 2008. She uses osteopathic manipulation to treat common adolescent musculoskeletal conditions. In addition, Dr. Gold is currently working on her Doctorate in Medical Qi Gong. Finally, Dr. Gold has expertise in travel medicine and transgender medicine. Dr. Gold enjoys teaching and mentoring junior faculty and health care trainees in human sexuality, sexual history-taking, adolescent reproductive health, and LGBTQI care. In her free time, Dr. Gold enjoys yoga, mindfulness medication, throwing pots on the wheel, memoir and other forms of creative writing, music ranging from baroque to Celtic to jazz, hiking, cooking, and travel, especially to South East Asia.
David L. Bell, MD, MPH
Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Population & Family Health at CUMC
Since 1999, Dr. Bell has been Medical Director of the Young Men's Clinic, a unique adjunct to New York Presbyterian Hospital's Family Planning Clinic. He currently serves on the John Snow Institute's Advisory Committee for the CDC Teen Pregnancy Prevention Project and serves on Mayor Bloomberg's Young Men's Initiative Advisory Board. He also serves as a consultant the National Medical Committee for Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Federal Office of Population Affairs. Dr. Bell has authored articles on adolescent male sexual and reproductive health, engaging males in health care and trends in reproductive health care delivery for adolescent males. His research includes studies on adolescent male relationship development and the knowledge and attitudes of adolescent and young adult males toward emergency contraception.