Now
This is a now page - a snapshot of what has my attention this season. It is kept honest by the same source-of-truth library that drives the rest of the site, so it updates when new work actually lands, not on a schedule.
Current focus
Day to day I practice medical oncology and lead research informatics at Vanderbilt Health, and I chair the mCODE Executive Committee. The through-line right now is the same one the whole site is about: getting clinical oncology, applied AI, and health-data standards to actually interoperate. That means structured genomics in the electronic health record, real-world prediction of immunotherapy outcomes and toxicity, and keeping mCODE usable as it becomes regulatory infrastructure for the CMS Enhancing Oncology Model.
The roles that anchor that work today:
- Associate Vice President for Research Informatics, Vanderbilt Health
- Associate Chief Medical Information Officer, Vanderbilt Health
- Ingram Associate Professor of Cancer Research, Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center
- Director of Cancer Clinical Informatics, Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center
- Co-Director, Data Science Shared Resource, Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center
- Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics and of Medicine (Division of Hematology and Oncology), Vanderbilt Health
- Chair, mCODE Executive Committee, American Society of Clinical Oncology
More on each: leadership & governance · six domains of expertise · full bio.
Recent activity
New publications, invited talks, scientific-meeting presentations, and press - drawn from the same library that drives /research/, /speaking/, and /press/. Last updated: .
Latest (last 12 months)
- Peer-reviewed publication The CAUSAL study: a prospective cohort of sarcoma survivors across the lifespan. BMC Cancer. Aug 27, 2026
- Peer-reviewed publication Harnessing Artificial Intelligence to Improve Oncology Care. Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network. May 20, 2026
- Invited talk HL7 International Working Group Meeting (Europe): "mCODE Overview and Current State". May 18, 2026
- Invited talk Vanderbilt Lecture Series CME (Nashville, Tennessee): "Using AI in Clinical Practice: Current Trends and Emerging Federal Regulations". May 7, 2026
- Abstract Abstract LB385: Polygenic risk score of genetic variants in genes encoding drug-metabolizing enzymes and drug transporters, in association with febrile neutropenia. Cancer Research. Apr 17, 2026
- Abstract Abstract LB385: Polygenic risk score of genetic variants in genes encoding drug-metabolizing enzymes and drug transporters, in association with febrile neutropenia. Cancer Research. Apr 15, 2026
- Invited talk 2026 NCCN Annual Conference (Orlando, Florida): "Harnessing Artificial Intelligence to Improve Oncology Care". Mar 28, 2026
- Invited talk NASEM Workshop: Policy Issues for Integrating Artificial Intelligence in Cancer Research and Care (Washington, DC): "AI in Cancer Care: 2 Wins, 2 Current Challenges". Mar 9, 2026
- Invited talk Jackson-Madison County General Hospital (Jackson, Tennessee): "An Update on the Use of AI in Clinical Practice". Mar 6, 2026
- Invited talk Blanchfield Army Community Hospital (Fort Campbell, Kentucky (virtual)): "Using AI in Clinical Practice: Current Trends and Emerging Federal Regulations". Feb 10, 2026
- Peer-reviewed publication SmokeBERT and Beyond: Bridging Clinical Narratives and Structured Smoking Data To Improve Lung Cancer Screening. JCO clinical cancer informatics. Dec 22, 2025
- Invited talk "Leveraging Data to Day-to-Day Improvements". Oct 31, 2025
- Peer-reviewed publication Clonal Hematopoiesis of Indeterminate Potential After Radiation Therapy. International Journal of Radiation Oncology*Biology*Physics. Oct 24, 2025
- Peer-reviewed publication Introducing mCODEGPT as a zero-shot information extraction from clinical free text data tool for cancer research. Communications Medicine. Oct 15, 2025
Latest writing
Longer arguments live in Essays; quick reactions to new research, policy, and product launches live in Notes. Most recent:
Essays
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Zero-shot extraction is changing cancer data abstraction
A registrar spends fifteen minutes pulling stage and biomarker status out of a note; a language model now does a first pass in seconds, the question is whether you can trust it.
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Our early ChatGPT-in-the-clinic study, three years on
In 2023 we asked whether a chatbot could answer real physician questions safely. The answer aged in instructive ways.
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Clinical AI's real bottleneck is the data layer, not the model
Health systems keep buying models and underfunding the structured data those models need. That ordering is backwards.
Find me elsewhere
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