Computer Science Seminar: Omolola Ogunyemi (Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science)

Speaker: Omolola Ogunyemi BC '93, Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science
Title: Tackling Diabetic Retinopathy in a Safety Net Healthcare Setting with Telehealth and Machine Learning

The seminar will be available for Zoom participation. If you would like to receive the Zoom link, please register using the “Register” button above.  

Diabetic retinopathy is the leading cause of blindness in working age adults in the United States. It is challenging to address in both rural and urban underserved settings, which suffer from shortages of eye specialists. This talk will describe the approach taken to address this condition in a medically underserved area (South Los Angeles) by researchers in the Center for Biomedical Informatics at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, using telehealth and machine learning on data from patient electronic health records.

Dr. Omolola Ogunyemi is a computer scientist and biomedical informatics researcher.  She is a Professor in the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science (CDU) in Los Angeles.  She is also Director of the University's Center for Biomedical Informatics, which focuses on providing biomedical informatics solutions that benefit medically underserved communities.

Her research interests include computerized medical decision support, reasoning under uncertainty, 3D graphics and visualization, machine learning and telehealth. Her recent work includes a National Library of Medicine-funded R01 grant to explore diabetic retinopathy prediction from safety net healthcare system clinical data, using different machine learning strategies.

Before moving to CDU, Dr. Ogunyemi was a biomedical informatics faculty member in the Department of Radiology at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School from 1999 until 2007. She was also a member of the affiliated faculty in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology from 2003 until 2007. She has taught graduate level biomedical informatics courses in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, at UCLA, at CDU, and short courses on informatics at the University of Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal), Durban, South Africa.

Dr. Ogunyemi is an elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. She holds an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Barnard College, New York, and an M.S.E, and Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania.