Background
Dr. Nawar Shara is the Chief of Research Data Science for the MedStar Health Research Institute, and co-director of the Center for Biostatistics Informatics and Data Science. She is an associate professor of medicine at Georgetown Medical School, and is a founding co-director of the AI Co-Lab, a new collaboration between MedStar Health and Georgetown University, studying artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare research and education. She earned her undergraduate degree in economics from Damascus University, Syria, and her Masters’ and PhD in applied statistics at American University in Washington DC. She has been at Georgetown for over 20 years.
Involvement in Research
Dr. Shara’s research involves leveraging AI and Machine Learning into healthcare, involving
voice assistance programs and chatbots to improve patients’ outcomes and patient-provider communication. One specific example of her work is using AI to help heart failure patients manage their daily activities with the goal of limiting readmissions. Recently, she has received an NIH-R01 grant from the National Institute of Minorities and Health Disparities to use large language models and voice assistance chatbots to help cancer patients manage their symptoms post-discharge. Another project she is working on is centered around implementing ML algorithms to develop tools for early identification and prevention of diseases, using retrospective data from patients’ electronic health records.
Inspiration
As an applied statistician, Dr. Shara’s focus is on finding solutions using given data that can be augmented to a broader level. She saw the potential to find scalable healthcare solutions through AI and machine learning as she witnessed the increasing capabilities of AI, computing power, and cloud infrastructure.
Reflection
Dr. Shara is very satisfied with the trajectory of her research from data science into healthcare.
One of her goals is to target clinicians’ burnout and mounting burden due to tedious
administrative tasks, and help them redirect their time towards patient interaction. Her lab aims to leverage AI to help ease the technological responsibilities of doctors and allow them to “do what they do best, which is spend time with their patients.”
Advice for Students
Dr. Shara advises students to think broadly about applications to real world scenarios, and hone in on what specifically interests them when working with researchers. For students interested in AI, she advises them to work towards a happy medium between the machine and the human, whilst being aware of the ethics, bias, and accountability of implementing tools.