Vibha Anand

Vibha Anand, PhD is a Senior Research Scientist and Manager for Healthcare Analytics team in the Center for Computational Health at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Cambridge, MA. She is co-leading the Clinical Trial Enhancement (CTE) theme for Accelerated Discovery in Healthcare and Life sciences.

Dr Anand's current research focuses on applying state of the art AI/ML and NLP techniques to health datasets, including prior observational studies, clinical trials, electronic medical record, and real-time biosensors. The overarching aim for this work is to inform ongoing and newer studies including clinical trials to accelerate drug discovery and development and to draw novel insights, especially from past observational studies. This work can pave way for enhanced recruitment in clinical trials and ultimately change practice guidelines. In the last 5+ years, Dr. Anand led the T1DI (Type 1 Diabetes Intelligence) collaboration for IBM Research with JDRF and its academic partners to study progression to type 1 diabetes onset during the pre-symptomatic period in young children and adults. This international collaboration with domain experts resulted in several high impact publications in the field of diabetes and endocrinology, the results of which have been also highlighted in several IBM Research and JDRF blogs.

Prior to IBM Research, Dr. Anand's work focused on pediatric health services research, especially in the area of clinical decision support. From this past work, she co-developed and evaluated a real-time clinical decision support system (CDSS), The Child Health Improvement through Computer Automation (CHICA), in pediatric clinics in partnership with Indiana University physician scientists, domain experts and community pediatricians. CHICA was in continuous use since 2005 at IU Hospitals and was later commercialized. It was also used in several NIH and CDC funded studies and clinical trials in pediatric and adolescent medicine to study interventions in well care and disease management such as for ADHD, type 2 diabetes, maternal depression and many more. CHICA is often cited as one of the most studied pediatric CDSS in continuous use, and this work resulted in several high impact publications advocating for screening and monitoring of affected conditions in young populations.

Before IBM Research, Dr. Anand served as an Assistant Professor at the Lerner School of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University and held a Staff Scientist position at the Pediatric Institute, Cleveland Clinic, Ohio and prior to it as Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, Indiana. Dr. Anand also possesses several years of engineering and technology development experience in leadership roles in software and telecommunications industry prior to her work in academic medicine.

She holds a Bachelors in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology, India, a Masters in Computer Science from University of New Haven, CT and PhD in Health Informatics from Indiana University, IN. Dr. Anand is a Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association (FAMIA) inaugural class, 2018.