Omolola Ogunyemi, PhD

Dr. Ogunyemi is a computer scientist and biomedical informatics researcher. She is Professor and Chair of 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 (NLM)-funded study that utilizes both unsupervised machine learning and qualitative methods to study COVID-19 vaccination and testing hesitancy. She has been 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. 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. She served on the National Library of Medicine's Biomedical Library and Informatics Review Committee study section from 2003-2007 and on the National Library of Medicine's Literature Selection and Technical Review Committee from 2010-2014 as a member and as chair (2013-2014). She has served as an editorial board member for the Journal of Biomedical Informatics (2015 - 2026), a member of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's Health Information Technology Research study section (2016 - 2019), a member of AMIA’s Doctoral Dissertation Award Committee (2017-2020), and a member of the National Library of Medicine’s Board of Regents (2021-2025). 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.