Andrew  Walker

Drew is a PhD Candidate in the department of Behavioral, Social, and Health Education Sciences at Emory University. Drew's interests include: natural language processing, provider bias, EHR, patient-reported outcomes, multilevel modeling, and reproducible data science methodologies. He is particularly interested in working with and developing data-driven clinical and community-based interventions, and understanding how bias and stigma affect healthcare delivery. 

Drew completed his Master in Health Education and Behavior at the Univeristy of Florida, while working as the Assistant Director for Streetlight at UF Health, an adolescent and young adult palliative care peer support program. During his time here, Drew became interested in social support, and how to evaluate support through networks, patient-reported outcomes, and language. Drew continues to conduct research and develop clinical data solutions for the Streetlight program to understand program impact and disseminate findings to other children's hospitals. 

Drew's current research is funded through the NIH- Training in Advanced Data Analytics Pre-doctoral fellowship, overseen by PIs Drs. Hannah Cooper and Lance Waller. Drew's dissertation topic focuses on appyling natural language processing techniques to identify biased and stigmatizing provider language in patient charts.

Through the TADA fellowship, Drew also works with Drs. Melvin Livingston and Abeed Sarker, focusing on utilizing social media to assess trends in: marketing of novel altcannabinoids, investigating patient-reported instances of stigma on online communities for opioid use disorder, and identifying source and locations of sodium nitrite on online suicide forums.