San Juan Bautista School of Medicine’s Dr. Yaritza Inostroza-Nieves Secures 2024 AIM-AHEAD Fellowship, Advancing Cardiovascular Research Through AI and Machine Learning
Congratulations to Dr. Yaritza Inostroza-Nieves, Associate Dean of Biomedical Sciences, Assistant Professor of Biochemistry, and active researcher at San Juan Bautista School of Medicine, on receiving the 2024 Traineeship in Advanced Data Analytics Fellowship Award!
This fellowship is a collaborative program between AIM-AHEAD and the All of Us Research Program Researcher Academy. We are proud and happy to share that Dr. Inostroza received great news from the AIM-AHEAD Consortium of her selection from over a hundred applications to receive this significant and competitive fellowship. Dr. Inostroza is the only representative of Puerto Rico out of 20 participants from January 15, 2024, through September 15, 2024. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) focus on creating systems or algorithms to make predictions or recommendations based on patterns within data.
A current research project studies endothelial cell activation as a critical pathophysiological mediator of stress, vascular vulnerability, and CVD risk. Dr. Inostroza is part of an interdisciplinary team of basic, clinical, and epidemiologic scientists working to characterize CVD risk among children exposed to trauma and identify CVD biomarkers. Being accepted in the AIM-AHEAD: All of Us Training Program will be highly relevant to acquiring the skills and knowledge to integrate the use of the database and infrastructure of All of Us with AI/ML methods to process large-scale data to identify patterns, mutations, variations, and genetic markers associated with specific diseases and lifestyles.
Dr. Inostroza’s long-term goal is to use the All of Us data to study the association between DNA methylation levels and mRNA biomarkers with critical clinical laboratory results after adjusting for socioeconomic status. She plans to integrate AI/ML models into her current projects to process the data and identify potential biomarkers and biological pathways affected by CVD-related lifestyles. She summarizes in her application that “Integrating AI and ML in public health and biomedical research holds immense promise in improving healthcare delivery, disease prevention, and overall population well-being.”
