Mousa Ghannam is a Doctor of Dental Medicine and Master’s in Public Health (DMD/MPH) dual-degree student at the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine and at the Perelman School of Medicine. Ghannam spent a year studying salivary gland development in a matrix and morphogenesis lab as a post-baccalaureate research fellow at the National Institutes of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR). Working for the NIH also afforded Ghannam the opportunity to work on data visualization using R for the Surgeon General’s Report on Oral Health 2020. Since then, he has become passionate about leveraging public health informatics, particularly with respect to electronic health records (EHRs), to improve standards of oral health care and to address oral health disparities. Additionally, he aims to learn how informatics can be used to learn about behavioral patterns of dental providers to improve their efficiency. His interest in informatics and its applications within dentistry, particularly public health, led him to start the dental school’s first Dental Informatics Club, which aims to promote accessibility, exposure, and education about this growing field. Ghannam holds a BA in Chemistry from Kalamazoo College.
Ghannam was a 2020 scholar in LDI’s SUMR program, where he worked on two projects related to electronic health records. With Dr. Austin Bean, he used neural networks to extract information about infant eating habits from electronic health records, with the goal of using this information in prediction of bodily size. Under the mentorship of Dr. Laudanski, Ghannam explored Intensive Care Unit (ICU) data to identify cognitive biases and practice patterns of health care providers, with an overall goal of devising strategies to improve decision-making processes and efficiency of health care delivery in the ICU.