Two Doctor of Heath Informatics Students Receive Pilot Grants to Advance AI-Driven Drug Safety
Two candidates in Rutgers School of Health Professions (SHP) Doctor of Health Informatics (DHI) program have been awarded $50,000 pilot grants to support leading-edge research aimed at improving medication safety through artificial intelligence and data analytics. Erin Roberts-McCarthy and James Green, both in the program’s Pharmacoinformatics track, are part of interdisciplinary research teams tackling distinct clinical challenges with a shared goal: advancing more personalized, data-driven approaches to predicting and preventing adverse drug outcomes.
The awards reflect the DHI program’s emphasis on combining industry expertise with informatics research to address health care challenges. Developed by Shankar Srinivasan, department chair, the program prepares scholar-practitioners to translate data and technology into safer, more effective patient care. Both students have advanced their research through mentorship across Rutgers, including guidance from Barbara Tafuto, assistant professor and interim program director of the Master of Science in Clinical Research Management program.
Erin Roberts-McCarthy
Erin Roberts-McCarthy
Erin Roberts-McCarthy is a doctoral candidate in Health Informatics (Pharmacoinformatics Track) with an anticipated graduation of May 2027.
She is completing her degree with track advising from Tafuto, and brings more than a decade of experience in pharmacoepidemiology and real-world evidence, having worked with major health care organizations and pharmaceutical clients including Moderna, GSK, and AbbVie.
She currently serves as lead health care analyst at Cohere Health and as an adjunct professor at Rutgers, teaching graduate courses in pharmacoinformatics and health data science. She is the founder of Kairos Pharmacovigilance LLC, a boutique consulting practice serving small and mid-size pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.
Roberts-McCarthy is part of a team awarded a 2026 Rutgers Center for Biomedical Informatics and Health Artificial Intelligence (BMIHAI) pilot grant of $50,000 in direct costs for the project, “AI-Derived Multi-Dimensional Therapeutic Sequencing for Precision Drug Response and Toxicity Prediction.”
The work confronts a challenge in pharmacotherapy: the reliance on trial-and-error in drug selection and management. Her team is building an AI-driven precision framework that integrates multi-dimensional clinical and pharmacological data to predict individual patient drug response and toxicity — moving past population-level prescribing norms toward individualized therapeutic sequencing that can reduce adverse drug events and improve outcomes.
The project is led by Luigi Brunetti, PharmD, PhD, associate professor and chair in the Department of Pharmacy Practice and Administration at Rutgers Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy, with co-investigators Srinivas Denduluri, in Rutgers’ Office of Advanced Research Computing, and Rahul Mittal, PhD, assistant professor of health informatics at SHP.
“My commitment to drug safety is both scientific and deeply personal,” McCarthy-Roberts said. “I believe that pharmacovigilance is not simply a regulatory obligation. It is a public health imperative.”
James Green
James Green
James Green is a doctoral candidate in health informatics with more than 15 years of health care analytics experience and a research focus on AI-augmented pharmacovigilance and drug-safety methodology. He currently serves as a business intelligence developer at Omnicell Enliven Health.
Green was named co-investigator on a New Jersey Alliance for Clinical and Translational Science (NJ ACTS) pilot grant of $50,000 in direct costs, awarded in June 2026 for the project “Multi-Source Evidence Convergence for Drug-Induced Cognitive Risk in Older Adults.” It is led by Principal Investigator Dr. Luciana Mascarenhas Fonseca of the Krieger Klein Alzheimer’s Research Center at Rutgers Brain Health Institute.
“The work I’m doing sits at the intersection of medication safety research, artificial intelligence, and clinical care,” Green said. “The goal is to develop tools that can make sense of complex health care data and provide insights that clinicians can use to improve patient care.”
The one-year pilot operationalizes the convergence framework in three ways: validates findings using electronic health record data in the RWJBarnabas Health system including kidney function test data; develops a model that can identify patients at greatest risk and creates a prototype clinical alert for bedside deployment; and analyzes brain imaging from two large research databases—the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) and UK Biobank to identify biomarkers associated with cognitive decline.
Although the study focuses on a specific drug interaction, the framework is designed to be adapted to other medication combinations, potentially helping clinicians identify risks earlier and personalize treatment decisions. The project is also expected to lay the groundwork for a larger federal grant application in 2027.