About the Vice President for Research and Health Affairs
Omolola (Lola) Ogunyemi is the current Interim Vice President for Research and Health Affairs at CDU. She is a computer scientist and biomedical informatics researcher. She is Director of CDU’s Center for Biomedical Informatics (CBI), and a co-chair of the UCLA CTSI's biomedical informatics program. She is also an Adjunct Professor of Radiological Sciences in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA with the Medical and Imaging Informatics group. Her research at the CBI focuses on novel biomedical informatics solutions for problems that affect medically underserved communities. Dr. Ogunyemi’s research interests include computerized medical decision support, reasoning under uncertainty, 3D graphics and visualization, and machine learning. Her work includes a National Library of Medicine (NLM)-funded study that utilizes both unsupervised machine learning and qualitative methods to study COVID-19 vaccination and testing hesitancy. She has been the principal investigator on an NLM-funded R01 study of machine learning approaches to identify patients with latent/undiagnosed diabetic retinopathy from electronic health records, on an NLM-funded R01 study of computerized decision support for penetrating trauma, and on a National Cancer Institute-funded R03 study of individualized breast cancer risk prediction using Bayesian networks.
Dr. Ogunyemi holds an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Barnard College, Columbia University and an M.S.E, and Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania. Before moving to CDU to become the Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics, 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 served as a faculty member in the Boston-area NLM-funded biomedical informatics fellowship training program (1999-2007). 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. She served on the NLM’s Biomedical Library and Informatics Review Committee study section from 2003-2007; on the NLM's Literature Selection and Technical Review Committee from 2010-2014 as a member and as chair (2013-2014); on the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's Health Information Technology Research study section (2016 - 2019); and is currently a member of the NLM’s Board of Regents (2021-2025). She is an editorial board member for the Journal of Biomedical Informatics (2015 - 2026) and an elected Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. She also serves as an external advisory board member for the NIH-funded AIM-AHEAD program.