By Mia Garchitorena
Vanderbilt’s Ellen Clayton, MD, JD, and Allison McCoy, PhD, have been elected to the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) class of 2023. The 23 new fellows will be inducted into the ACMI at the 2023 American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Annual Symposium, held in New Orleans.
The ACMI is an honorary college of more than 400 elected fellows from the United States and abroad who have made significant and sustained contributions to the field of medical informatics and who have met rigorous scholarly scrutiny by their peers.
“I remember learning about the ACMI fellows in my first year of the PhD program at Vanderbilt in our Introduction to Biomedical Informatics course, said McCoy, assistant professor and Director of the Clinical Informatics Core in the Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “It’s a huge honor to join them now, and I’m incredibly thankful to my mentors who guided me and to my family for their support.”
McCoy is an expert in applied clinical informatics. She works within the Vanderbilt Clinical Informatics Center on numerous projects related to clinical decision support systems, VUMC operational health information technology, improving electronic health records and more. In 2018, McCoy was named a Fellow of AMIA. In 2022, she was named to the inaugural class of AMIA Certified Health Informatics Professional Diplomates. Learn more about her research at allisonmccoy.com.
Clayton is the Craig-Weaver Professor of Pediatrics and co-founder of the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society at VUMC and professor of Law at Vanderbilt University School of Law. She is an internationally respected leader in the field of health law and genomics who has worked with numerous faculty and students in and outside of Vanderbilt University on research projects related to bioethics, reproductive rights, public health and research ethics.
She also collaborates with DBMI’s Brad Malin, PhD, on projects such as eMerge, LawSeq, the Center for Excellence in ELSI Research, Genetic Privacy and Identity in Community Settings and now AIM-AHEAD and the National Institutes of Health program called Bridge to Artificial Intelligence (Bridge2AI).
“I have had the pleasure of working with many of Dr. Malin’s colleagues and trainees. In all of this work, I have stretched and learned a lot, and we have written dozens of papers that have made important contributions to our understanding of privacy and data governance. What a gift,” Clayton said.
“Dr. Clayton’s research in bioethics and law has greatly influenced how health and genomic data is collected, processed and shared across the world,” said Malin, Accenture Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Biostatistics and Computer Science, vice chair for Research Affairs in DBMI and founder and director of the Vanderbilt HEAlth Data Science Center. “It is wonderful to see the AMIA community recognize her achievements.”
