Our team is diverse, with experts in medicine, informatics, public
health, and data visualization from across the United States.
Jessica Ancker
PhD MPH
Principal Investigator
Jessica Ancker
PhD MPH
Principal Investigator
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Jessica Ancker studies ways to make important information easier to access and use for decision-making. She is particularly passionate about helping people make better use of numerical and statistical information. One powerful way to do this is through information design that leverages our understanding of human cognition. Many years ago, her interest in this topic was sparked when she stumbled across a study showing that simply reformatting numbers in a tricky word problem vastly increased the number of people who could solve it.
Favorite Paper:
U Hoffrage, S Lindsey, R Hertwig, G Gigerenzer (2000). Communicating statistical information. Science. 290(5500) 2261-2.
Brian Zikmund-Fisher
PhD
Co-Investigator
Brian Zikmund-Fisher
PhD
Co-Investigator
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Brian is Associate Professor of Health Behavior and Health Education, Research Associate Professor of Internal Medicine, and Associate Director of the Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Trained in decision psychology and behavioral economics, he designs and evaluates methods of making health data more intuitively meaningful, studies the impact of people’s consistent preferences for more versus less health care on over- and underutilization of care, and explores the power of narratives in health communications. He was recently named as incoming Editor-in-Chief (as of January 2021) for the journals Medical Decision Making and Medical Decision Making: Policy & Practice.
Favorite Paper:
BJ Zikmund-Fisher, AM Scherer, HO Witteman, JB Solomon, NL Exe, BA Tarini, A Fagerlin (2017). Graphics help patients distinguish between urgent and non-urgent deviations in laboratory test results. JAMIA. 24(3) 520-8.
Stephen Johnson
PhD
Co-Investigator
Stephen Johnson
PhD
Co-Investigator
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Stephen Johnson, PhD, FACMI is a professor of Population Health at NYU Langone Health, and is the director of Clinical Research Informatics for the medical center. Dr. Johnson is a nationally recognized expert in natural language processing, and has worked on a variety of research projects in the health domain that apply these methods to improve collaboration and communication among health professionals and biomedical researchers, and public health messages directed at patients or the public. A current project is studying the use of intelligent agents (chatbots) to assist patients. An interesting recent study used linguistic methods to assess the health literacy of patients.
Favorite Paper:
SA Crossley, R Balyan, J Liu, AJ Karter, D McNamara, D Schillinger (2020). Developing and Testing Automatic Models of Patient Communicative Health Literacy Using Linguistic Features: Findings from the ECLIPPSE study. Health Communication. 2:1-11.
Marianne Sharko
MD MS
Preventative Medicine Resident
Marianne Sharko
MD MS
Preventative Medicine Resident
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Marianne is a pediatrician with an interest in health literacy and effective communication of medication instructions, particularly for the pediatric patient. She obtained her medical degree from Cornell Medical College, completed her pediatric residency at Columbia Presbyterian, and returned to Weill Cornell for her master’s degree in Health Informatics. She is currently an ECRIP Scholar in the Fellowship for Health Services Research, and a resident in preventive medicine. These programs combine her passion for preventive pediatric care with her love of research. She works in pediatric obesity and teenage parenting clinics providing clinical care with a focus on guiding families with high social needs. She loves to travel as much as possible, especially with her husband and three kids. She loves skiing, yoga and hiking with her crazy dog Baxter.
Favorite Paper:
MK Paasche-Orlow, D Schillinger, BD Weiss, et al (2018). Health Literacy and Power. Health literacy research and practice. 2(3) e132-3.
Natalie Benda
PhD
Post-Doctoral Associate
Natalie Benda
PhD
Post-Doctoral Associate
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Natalie (Nat) Benda’s work involves improving communication of information for patient and healthcare professionals. Nat is an expert in human factors engineering, the science that investigates how people acquire, use, and interpret information, and uses this understanding to create solutions that support human work. She is interested in designing health information that is accessible for diverse groups of people, in particular for patients with limited English proficiency.
Favorite Paper:
BJ McNeil, SG Pauker, HC Sox Jr, A Tversky (1982). On the elicitation of preferences for alternative therapies. NEJM. 306 (21) 1259-62.
Lisa Grossman
MD-PhD Student
Lisa Grossman
MD-PhD Student
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Lisa researches tools and technologies to help doctors and patients make better decisions. Her work is practical, uses state-of-the-art methods, and has led to recent advances in the field. She is also enthusiastic about using visual design to improve how doctors and patients interact with computers. Before pursuing her degree, she founded and directed a for-profit design collaborative, active over 8 years in multiple countries. She is the one who built this website.
Favorite Paper:
TC Veinot, H Mitchell, JS Ancker (2018). Good intentions are not enough: how informatics interventions can worsen inequality. JAMIA. 25(8) 1080-8.
Mohit Sharma
MPH
Research Coordinator
Mohit Sharma
MPH
Research Coordinator
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After graduating from medical school in India, Mohit Sharma completed his Master’s in Public Health (MPH) from Texas A&M University. He brings his unique background of serving as a junior physician and a researcher where he has worked in several cross-functional projects involving patient interaction and health communication. He has been directly involved in designing and evaluating qualitative and quantitative research. He is interested in studying the impact of socio-cultural and behavioral factors in understanding health information.
Favorite Paper:
DC Berry, P Knapp, DK Raynor (2002). Provision of information about drug side-effects to patients. The Lancet. 359(9309) 853-4.
