Alex Butler
Medical Student Researcher
Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics
Alex Butler is an MD Candidate at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons. While in medical school, he is also pursuing a Master’s Degree in Biomedical Informatics working with Dr. Chunhua Weng.
His central research focus is leveraging new technologies to improve patient access to clinical trials. He is primarily using Machine Learning methods on Big Data to find important trends in eligibility criteria and patient recruitment, informing all stakeholders about how clinical trials can be structured to best identify relevant patients. In addition, before starting in the MD program in 2016, Alex spent 2 years working at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center where he helped to develop an automated clinical trial eligibility screening platform in the Prostate Cancer Service, eventually leading him to the world of Informatics.
Butler A, Wei W, Yuan C, Kang T, Si Y, Weng C. The Data Gap in the EHR for Clinical Research Eligibility Screening. AMIA Jt Summits Transl Sci Proc. 2018;2017:320–329. Published 2018 May 18.
