Our interdisciplinary team at UNLV bridges computer science, nursing, and public health โ applying machine learning, NLP, and large-scale data analytics to the most pressing challenges in healthcare delivery.
We develop AI-driven tools and analytical frameworks that help clinicians, policymakers, and researchers make better decisions โ ultimately improving patient outcomes across diverse populations.
Applying state-of-the-art transformer models and deep learning to clinical text, ICD codes, and healthcare claims data.
Mining All-Payer Claims Databases and national datasets to reveal patterns in care equity, utilization, and outcomes.
Bridging Computer Science, Nursing, Public Health, and Economics to tackle healthcare's hardest problems together.
From maternal health policy to AI-powered nursing classification, our work spans the full spectrum of healthcare challenges.
Harnessing a 4TB statewide claims database to identify risk factors for severe maternal morbidity โ affecting 50,000+ women annually โ and test AI-driven interventions for equitable care.
Applying NLP and predictive modeling to nursing administrative data to surface quality insights, identify care gaps, and build scalable classification pipelines for clinical decision support.
A study leveraging transformer-based models (BEHRT) to automatically classify nursing diagnoses from ICD-coded claims โ enabling scalable population-level nursing quality research.
Using UNLV's VR/AR infrastructure, Unity development expertise, and clinical nursing leadership to build immersive simulation environments for rare, high-stakes scenarios nurses may rarely encounter โ but must always be ready for.
An interdisciplinary team spanning nursing, computer science, and public health.
A certified nurse-midwife and PhD-trained researcher, Dr. Vanderlaan leads groundbreaking work on maternal risk, risk-appropriate care, and midwifery workforce policy. She bridges clinical expertise with population-level data science.
A pioneer in information retrieval, OCR, and large-scale database systems, Dr. Taghva leads data engineering and machine learning infrastructure for the team's most computationally demanding projects.
Dr. Fonseca specializes in NLP, health data pipelines, and AI systems design. He leads the group's work in applying transformer models and machine learning to real-world nursing and healthcare datasets.
We're actively publishing, building new tools, and expanding our research portfolio. Stay tuned as we add new datasets, collaborators, and open-source tools.