CWRU Commencement 2026.
This spring’s AMIA Amplify Informatics program committee selected abstracts for presentation authored by two Cleveland Institute for Computational Biology (CICB) and Biomedical & Health Informatics (BHI) PhD program trainees: Carly Rose and Shraddha Dumawat. Amplify Informatics is the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) annual spring conference, now organized as a merger of both the former Clinical Informatics Conference and the Informatics Summit. This year’s conference featured research in translational bioinformatics, clinical research informatics, AI & data science, and clinical informatics. The conference was held May 18-21, 2026, in Denver, Colorado.
Carly Rose’s paper, titled “Leadership, Informatics Expertise, and Resources: Determinants of Institutional Data Sharing in the National Clinical Cohort Collaborative (N3C)”, was selected for an oral presentation in the section TRI32: Ledgers, Chains, and Trust. Carly, mentored by me, had just graduated and participated in Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) School of Medicine’s PhD commencement ceremony days before flying to Denver for the conference. It’s been a busy Spring semester, to say the least.
Acknowledgements at AMIA Amplify Informatics 2026.
Carly’s research as a BHI trainee leveraged the N3C, a large data enclave of clinical data across the United States initially developed during the pandemic for rapid COVID-19 research. Carly used N3C for her PhD dissertation research to better understand the impact COVID-19 infection, alone and in combination with the shingles vaccine, had on the risk of late-onset Alzheimer disease over a five-year period. During her research, Carly noticed that while many institutions with electronic health records shared clinical data with N3C, several large institutions did not. Carly found that institutions with resources such as informatics expertise and funding through specific government grants were more likely to share clinical data compared with those who did not, but these factors did not completely explain data sharing behaviors.
Prom pose! AMIA Amplify Informatics 2026.
Using data shared with N3C, Carly found that COVID-19 infection is associated with an increased risk of Alzheimer’s diagnosis within five years, and that the vaccine for shingles is associated with a decreased risk. These findings highlight the potential role of viral infections in Alzheimer disease risk and potential strategies individuals can take to mitigate that risk. Carly’s research on Alzheimer risk after COVID-19 infection is currently under review with a peer-reviewed journal, but a preprint of her work can be found at https://www.medrxiv.org/
Poster excitement at AMIA Amplify Informatics 2026.
Also at AMIA was BHI trainee Shraddha Dumawat, mentored by Dr. Will Bush. Shraddha’s abstract “From risk to trajectories, Alzheimer’s genetic variants differentially shape cognitive decline timing across domains” was accepted for a poster presentation. Shraddha‘s research focused on genetic changes that are known to be associated with Alzheimer disease risk in European descent groups. Shraddha investigated whether or not these genetic risks are also associated with the speed of cognitive decline in participants from the Alzheimer Disease Sequencing Project. Shraddha found that some genetic changes are associated with shifts in timing towards decline while others are associated with a protective delay in decline. Shraddha is planning to extend the study beyond the 62 genetic changes and to include more groups. Shraddha and her mentor Dr. Bush anticipate that final results from this study will help explain why two patients with seemingly similar profiles have different experiences in cognitive decline.
Meeting your academic grandparent at AMIA Amplify Informatics.
Like other scientific conferences, AMIA Amplify Informatics was a great forum for presenting science, networking, and reconnecting with old friends. While Carly has wrapped up her time here at CWRU as a graduate student, others like Shraddha in the CWRU BHI PhD program are just getting started and are sure to submit their lastest and greatest science to AMIA Amplify Informatics in the near future.
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Travel to AMIA Amplify Informatics was made possible by T32AG71474 (Rose) and a CWRU 2026 Flora Stone Mather Center for Women Research and Professional Development Grant (Crawford).
