Alumni
Over 110 students have graduated from the Department of Biomedical Informatics (25+ PhD, 50+ MS, 25+ Certificate). The diversity of careers available to DBMI alumnus is evident in their biographies. Many of our graduates are teaching and performing research in academic institutions, such as Vanderbilt University, Arizona State University, and New York University while others have entered private industry with companies such as Cerner Corporation and Boston Scientific; some have positions in government agencies, such as the NIH and AHRQ, while others are at major medical centers, serving in roles such as Chief Medical Information Officer. We maintain a database of the career paths of our graduates. If you are an alumnus, please contact us if you would like to submit or update information!
Eric Strobl
Assistant Professor
Biographical Info
Dr. Strobl joined our department July 1, 2024, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Psychiatry. Dr. Strobl did his training in the Pitt MSTP and was among the most productive MD PhD students in the history of DBMI. He authored 14 peer-reviewed journal and conference articles when he was at Pitt.
Dr. Strobl performs research in causal machine learning to detect new treatment targets for diseases from potentially non-experimental datasets. He was mentored by Shyam Visweswaran, MD PhD (Vice-Chair of Clinical Informatics for DBMI) and Gregory Cooper, MD PhD (Vice-Chair for Research for DBMI). There are very few individuals in the country with his training and aptitude for research in this important and rapidly growing area of study. Dr. Strobl completed his residency in Psychiatry and his fellowship in Child/Adolescent Psychiatry in summer 2024 at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Eric will spend 80% of his time in research in causal inference and discovery research at DBMI and 20% clinical work in the Department of Psychiatry.
Research Interests: Eric plans to develop automated procedures that identify root causes of disease from data. A machine usually breaks down because of one or a few problems, like one rusty gear. Different copies of the machine also break down usually due to the same set of issues, like the same exposed gear. Analogously, diseases often result from a few root causes, and patients with complex disease often share the same root causes. Root causes also initiate a cascade of causal events called pathogenesis that generates a constellation of clinical symptoms. Targeting root causes can thus mitigate all downstream pathology and clinical symptoms while minimizing polypharmacy.
Dr. Strobl’s work will help DBMI continue to build interdisciplinary research on campus, and act as a bridge to the Department of Psychiatry for AI/ML (particularly causal discovery) and add to DBMI’s central scientific strength, which Drs. Visweswaran and Cooper lead for UPSoM.