Interview with Dr. Lola Ogunyemi Interim Vice President for Research( continued)
What do you see as some key research initiatives that ought to be given high priority? I’ m a computer scientist by training. My focus is computing, which is very different from working in a wet lab. One of the things that I learned almost immediately upon taking on the interim role was about the need for a vivarium to support preclinical research at CDU. We had a vivarium across the street. We had very favorable terms, like $ 1 a year in rent. But the County has other plans for that building.
We’ ve had to talk to our partners and many of our researchers are using the Lundquist Institute’ s vivarium facilities right now, but that’ s a long distance away, and it’ s kind of inconvenient for a lot of people to have to travel across town. One of the things that we’ ve been able to do in this eight-month interim period is to submitt an $ 8 million construction grant to the NIH to build a preclinical research facility that will support a new vivarium. That’ s one of the things I’ m very excited about, because NIH construction grants weren’ t necessarily on my radar before, but they definitely came on my radar once I was in this position.
CDU is in the early stages of making a significant investment in artificial intelligence as a training and research strategy, such as with the new fouryear medical program, correct? I’ ve been doing AI and machine learning for over 17 years, so I’ m happy that the rest of the world is now equally as enthusiastic about it. But it’ s something that’ s been around for quite a while, although generative AI is making a splash. But in the medical domain, there’ s still a lot of work to be done using AI for diagnosis, prognosis, prognostic monitoring, and so on. the outcomes is that medical students in the future will be able to get an MD degree as well as a health informatics degree.
Robert and I both teach Principles of Biomedical Informatics, an introduction to informatics in the Master of Biomedical Science program in the College of Science in Health. Increasingly, physicians have to be able to master the use of a computer and have to contend with AI algorithms already. They’ re embedded in electronic health record systems; they pop up alerts and reminders and give physicians information on the best ways to address certain situations. It’ s already there.
Our students will have to become familiar with that either in the clinical setting or beforehand, and the master’ s program is one way. Another way that I know is that the College of Medicine is looking getting a number of licenses through OpenAI for ChatGPT so that medical students can use generative AI to answer questions about anatomy, physiology, and so forth, and incorporate that into their study. They can use that to simulate certain exercises such as interactions with patients before they actually have to meet people live. They get to practice beforehand. There’ s all kinds of ways in which AI can be used at a formal, you know, degree level and on a day-to-day basis, handling the material for medical school.
And one of the things that we’ ve been interested in at CDU is a health informatics master’ s program that includes courses in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing in the medical domain. One of the things that I foresee is that we establish that master’ s program. Dr. Robert Jenders, an internal medicine physician at CDU with a master’ s degree in computer science, and I are working on putting that program together. One of
CDU College of Medicine | PG. 22