The CTS Core Faculty

To start things off, let's introduce the faculty...

CTS draws faculty from all the Colleges and Schools of UVM as well as The Muskie School at the University of Southern Maine, The University of Puerto Rico in San Juan, and The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. However, these eight faculty members specialize in CTS, teach our core foundation courses, advise students, mentor investigators, and play an active role in Seminars in CTS and the Workshop in CTS.

 

Peter Callas, PhD, Research Associate Professor of Mathematics & Statistics, is a talented epidemiologist and teacher. His courses for undergraduates on statistics are very well received (by an audience that does not often value statistical teaching!). He brings this experience to his collaboration with Dr. Pinckney on Analyzing Clinical and Translational Research and Multivariate Methods for Clinical and Translational Research. His research interests range widely from assessment of teaching techniques to smoking cessation.

 

Elizabeth S. Chen, PhD, Assistant Professor of Medicine and Computer Science, is Associate Director of Biomedical Informatics for the CCTS. Dr. Chen’s research interests include electronic health records, clinical decision support, and applications of data mining and natural language processing. She has practical clinical informatics experience from New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Partners HealthCare, and Fletcher Allen Health Care. Previous teaching experience includes lectures in informatics courses at Columbia University (“Theory and Methods in Biomedical Informatics”), Harvard School of Public Health (“Medical Informatics”), and Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (“Medical Decision Support”). Dr. Chen will be teaching Applications in Biomedical and Health Informatics.

 

Amanda G. Kennedy, PharmD, BCPS, is Research Assistant Professor of Medicine and Director of the Vermont Academic Detailing Program, a prescriber support and education program. Dr. Kennedy's research (funded by AHRQ/HRSA/State government) involves ambulatory patient safety, outcomes research, pharmacoepidemiology, and clinical quality improvement. She educates healthcare providers in 30-40 primary care practices per year in evidence-based prescribing. She has taught Designing Clinical and Translational Research 3 times and recently transformed it into a paperless course utilizing the University's BlackBoard system.

 

Benjamin Littenberg, MD, Henry and Carleen Tufo Professor of Medicine and Professor of Nursing, is Director of General Internal Medicine and Director of the CCTS Educational and Career Development Programs. His background is in Technology Assessment including decision modeling, cost-effectiveness analysis, and meta-analysis. He has directed large scale clinical trials, including the Vermont Diabetes Information System. Current interests include Clinical Informatics, Helath Geography, obesity and diabetes management, and Quality Improvement.

 

Charles D. MacLean, MDCM, Professor of Medicine, is an Internist with a special interest in Informatics and an alumnus of our Faculty Development Program. He is the Project Director of the Vermont Diabetes Information System, a statewide registry that is undergoing clinical trials, Director of Research for the Vermont Area Health Education Centers, and Associate Dean for Primary Care. He plays an integral role in the evaluation of the Vermont Blueprint for Health public-private initiative to improve chronic illness care in Vermont. He teaches medical students and residents and developed our novel curriculum on Reporting Clinical Research based on principles of adult learning theory.

 

Richard G. Pinckney, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor of Medicine, is an Internist with research interests in quality improvement. He is an alumnus of our Faculty Development Program and the Principal Investigator on research into communication strategies around pharmaceutical marketing. He has substantial experience teaching clinicians in the hospital and the clinic and used those skills to develop a statewide academic detailing program on wise prescribing that uses novel approaches to educate practicing clinicians. With Dr. Callas, he originated our course sequence on analysis and has developed a reputation as an unusually gifted translator of statistical theory and methods for non-statisticians.

 

Alan S. Rubin, MD, Research Associate Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry, is an Internist interested in the medical care of the mentally ill and communication skills training. Dr. Rubin is a master teacher who has pioneered the use of “programmed patients” for first year medical students and is director of the Doctoring Skills course for medical students. He designed and teaches both Conducting Clinical Research and Cell to Society which has become an extraordinarily successful “capstone” course for many students.

 

Indra Neil Sarkar, PhD, MLIS, Assistant Professor of Microbiology & Molecular Genetics and Computer Science, is Director of Biomedical Informatics for the CCTS. His research (funded by NIH/NLM) involves exploring secondary uses of biological and clinical data through the development and use of semantic technologies (ontology development and use) as well as knowledge integration and discovery methods. Dr. Sarkar has organized and taught a range of courses (including “Introduction to Biomedical Informatics,” “Clinical Decision Support Systems,” and “Internet Integration into Health Care”) as well as tutorials nationally and internationally (including at the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing, the NLM/MBL Short Course on Biomedical Informatics, and the Mini-symposium in Life Science at Tjärnö, Sweden).