Divya Jahagirdar
School of Information
Health Informatics
MS Student

Divya is a first-year master’s student in the Health Informatics program. She received a Bachelor’s degree in Dental Surgery and worked as a licensed dentist in Hyderabad, South India, before coming to graduate school at the University of Michigan. Her clinical work experience taught her the importance of interoperability and digitized health records in a fast-paced medical set-up, and her coursework introduced her to the benefits of personalized medicine and precision health care. Divya’s primary interest lies in the exponential growth in unstructured data in electronic health records and how the use of use machine-learning models can help clinicians achieve their goals. Clinical decision support (CDS), in particular, is something she is deeply interested in given her background as a health care provider.

Mohamad Ismail
College of Pharmacy
Doctor of Clinical Pharmacy Translational Sciences
PhD Candidate

Mohamad is a pharmacist and in his first year of the Clinical Pharmacy Translational Science program. He hopes to be a health services researcher. He is interested in inspecting the role of pharmacists and other health care providers in influencing medication use, such as medication adherence and medication-therapy management (particularly oral anti-cancer agents) and developing personalized cancer treatment approaches and translating them into clinical practice (implementation science). His long-term research goal is to investigate possible approaches to impact and improve medication-taking behavior. Mohamad is also interested in understanding the factors that may predict medication nonadherence, and how polypharmacy affects patient health-reported outcomes such as patients’ functional status, subjective well-being, and quality of life.

Shana Littleton
College of Pharmacy
Doctor of Clinical Pharmacy Translational Sciences
PhD Candidate

Shana is a first-year student in the Clinical Pharmacy Translational Science program. She is currently studying on the precision pharmacotherapy track. Her work investigates genomic ancestry and social factors that may influence clinical outcomes of a diverse group of heart failure patients taking angiotensin inhibitors. Shana’s goal is to become an independent investigator focused on pharmacogenomic implementation. Many promising discoveries are not always translated into clinical practice. Her goal is to bridge this gap with her education in pharmacogenomics and interests in implementation to provide timely delivery of the most effective treatments to patients.

Erin Zhan
School of Information
Health Informatics
MS Student

Erin is a first-year master’s student in the Health Informatics program. Having worked in a variety of research settings, she discovered the power of data and the importance of taking into account individual differences when developing solutions. The breadth of knowledge she gained in the scientific community, combined with her neuroscience degree, clinical, and industry experiences, demonstrate how scientific research and precision health impact population health, and their potential to transform healthcare. Erin’s short-term goal is to work as a clinical informatics analyst. She wants to help organizations achieve improvements in health outcomes, and help patients receive individualized care. After seeing the limited medical resources available when she volunteered in Ecuador and Nepal, her long-term goal is to serve as a global health leader and to develop an information system that would allow better medical supply reallocation and enhanced education for disadvantaged people.