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The UNC School of Medicine has selected UNC Lineberger’s Arlene Chung, MD, MHA, MMCi, assistant professor of medicine and pediatrics, as one of two recipients of the Jefferson Pilot Award, along with Jiandong Liu, PhD, associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine. Each will receive $5,000 for each of the next four years to support their scholarly endeavors.

Arlene Chung, MD, MHA, MMCi.

Chung was selected to receive the award for her research that seeks to develop new statistical and visualization approaches to enable precision lifestyle recommendations, according to an announcement from the UNC School of Medicine.

Her research is focused on patients with inflammatory bowel diseases and leverages prior work from IBD Partners, which is a PCORI-funded, patient-powered research network. Chung and her team plan to develop innovative preprocessing, machine learning, and visualization methods to leverage patient-generated health data more effectively. Additionally, she will develop a software platform called Precision VISSTA to allow for data exploration through interactive visualizations to examine various types of patient-generated health data from wearable devices and apps that measure physical activity and sleep.

Chung’s efforts will be valuable in combing heterogeneous data from numerous patients into an integrated platform to enable knowledge discovery at both individual patient and cohort levels. Precision VISSTA will present results in novel visual formats to make insights about individual patients more accessible to health care providers.

Chung is also associate director of the Program on Health and Clinical Informatics and maintains an active primary care clinical practice focused on the care of complex patients with cancer and multiple chronic conditions. She also serves as the Lead Informatics Physician for Patient Engagement for UNC Health Care.

Read more about her work.