Current Lab Members, Trainees, and Alumni

Faraz Ahmad, MD, MS, is a practicing heart failure cardiologist who treats patients across the full spectrum of heart failure. His clinical expertise includes managing various cardiomyopathies, advanced heart failure, and patients who have undergone heart transplantation or mechanical assist device support (LVAD). He has a particular interest in diagnosing and treating heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, especially conditions like cardiac amyloidosis.

As the associate medical director of the Northwestern Medicine Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute Center for Artificial Intelligence, Ahmad leads initiatives to develop and implement machine-learning-enabled digital health tools for clinical practice.  

His research centers on applying data science, machine learning, and digital health technologies to improve the quality of care and patient-centered outcomes for all patients with heart failure and other cardiovascular conditions. His research program includes the development, implementation, and scaling of digital health solutions to enable learning health systems for continuous quality improvement and pragmatic research studies. His work has received support from organizations including the National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Association, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, the Heart Failure Society of America, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Lacey Gleason, MSPH, is a program administrator at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine with experience in health informatics, health services research, healthcare quality and practice improvement. Her current projects focus on using health information technology to enhance the delivery and uptake of evidence-based treatments for cardiovascular disease with the ultimate goal of improving clinical and patient-centered outcomes.

Gleason previously served as the research operations lead for the Center for Health Information Partnerships. Before joining Northwestern University, she earned an MS in Public Health in Health Policy and Health Services Research from Emory University and a BA in Biology from Columbia University. She has previously worked on research, quality improvement and strategic planning projects at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine.

She is also an AmeriCorps alumna who served in the Community HealthCorps to improve healthcare access and outcomes at Federally Qualified Health Centers.

Amanda Ho-Sauvage is a Chicagoland native with a background in psychology and healthcare administration. Driven by a strong interest in health equity and innovation, she earned her Master of Science in Healthcare Administration at Northwestern University, where she focused on the intersection of technology, patient experience, and clinical research. She is passionate about improving access to care through innovative system designs and collaborative research.

In her free time, she enjoys reading, spending time with her family, friends, and dog Mousse, as well as trying new restaurants.

Mercedes Nodal, originally from Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, is a research project coordinator at I.AIM, currently involved in CIRCL-Chicago, CAPriCORN, AIM-HI and STELLAR projects. She joined Northwestern University in 2016, following her tenure at a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC), where she contributed to various research studies as a bilingual community engagement specialist and research assistant.

With over a decade of experience in community outreach, she has successfully collaborated with non-profit organizations, political and religious groups, hospitals and schools to promote health awareness and improve outreach within the Latino community. 

Simon Benigeri, MSAI, is a PhD student in Artificial Intelligence at Northwestern University, advised by Professor Larry Birnbaum. His primary research areas are natural language processing and conversational AI. The goal is to build practical conversational AI systems by making LLMs more reliable and robust for tasks, domains and conversational behaviors.

He has also worked with Faraz Ahmad, MD, MS, applying AI and ML to problems in cardiology. 

Nick Easton, MSAI, attended Case Western Reserve University for his undergraduate studies in Physics and Mathematics. His interest in AI began as a summer research experience at Northwestern University, building models to classify stellar systems with variable magnitude. Following that work, he completed his MS in Artificial Intelligence at Northwestern University.

Since then, he has worked with Faraz Ahmad, MD, MS, on several projects concerning cardiac amyloidosis and other heart diseases. Using structured data, clinical notes, echocardiograms and other sources of clinical data, these projects have sought novel applications of AI to identify disease and augment existing workflows. When not at his computer, he enjoys rock climbing, swimming and long walks with his dog. 

Elizabeth Gray, MS, grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, but has lived in Chicago since attending the University of Chicago, where she received a BS in Mathematics and an MS in Statistics. She began working at Northwestern in the Department of Preventive Medicine in 2017, as part of the Biostatistics Collaboration Center (BCC). She is currently a senior biostatistician, working on projects in informatics, human longevity and obstetrics, including the K2 HF Prediction project. Outside of Northwestern, she is a soprano in her church choir, and spends a lot of time playing tennis, sailing, skiing, practicing yoga and showing people pictures of her orange cat. 

Anna Pawlowski, MBA, received her BA in 2005 from Nicolaus Copernicus University in Poland. The same year, she moved to the U.S. and completed her MBA degree in 2009 at Northeastern Illinois University. In 2012, she joined the Northwestern Medicine Enterprise Data Warehouse (NMEDW) team as a research analyst.

Pawlowski has been with NMEDW since then and is now a senior research analyst. In her day-to-day work, she writes SQL queries to extract data from the EDW and build dashboards to visualize the data. Outside of work, she enjoys travelling, playing tennis and gardening.

Ike Bolakale-Rufai, MD, MS, is a resident physician in Internal Medicine at the McGaw Medical Center of Northwestern University. She currently conducts research on guideline-directed medical therapy (GDMT) adherence under the mentorship of Faraz Ahmad, MD, MS, as part of the Faraz Ahmad Lab.

Following medical school, Bolakale-Rufai earned an MS in Clinical and Translational Sciences from the University of Arizona. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in cardiovascular research at Indiana University School of Medicine. Her work on postpartum major adverse cardiovascular events in patients with preeclampsia earned her recognition as a finalist for the American Heart Association’s Quality of Care and Outcomes Research (QCOR) Early Career Investigator Abstract Award. Her work has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including Circulation, European Society of Cardiology and JACC: Heart Failure.

Bolakale-Rufai's research interests focus on improving access to guideline-directed medical therapy for heart failure and advancing maternal cardiovascular health with long-term goals of becoming a physician-scientist and driving improvements in cardiovascular outcomes for patients.

Olise Oputa, DPhil, MD, is passionate about the biological sciences and serving the general populace through diverse avenues. Although medicine wasn't the most obvious route for him growing up, it ultimately emerged as the best way for him to make a meaningful impact.

As an NIH Diversity Fellow in the Abraira Lab, Oputa is developing a novel machine learning platform to track functional locomotor recovery in mice after spinal cord injury. He is a part of the cohort of physician-scientists poised to shape the ethical use and implementation of AI in medical and healthcare decision-making.

Jack Sollee, MD, is an Internal Medicine resident pursuing a Cardiology fellowship. He is originally from Washington, D.C., and spent time in Philadelphia, PA and Providence, RI for undergraduate and medical school. He works on the Early Detection of Cardiac Amyloidosis project. He is interested in the intersection of AI and clinical medicine.