I am a Professor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) with a primary appointment in the Health Policy and Management Department under the College of Public Health and a secondary appointment in the Department of Biomedical Informatics under the College of Medicine (Jan '22 - present). With an educational background in informatics, software engineering, and computer science, I conduct translational informatics research to improve pressing healthcare challenges. My current research areas include informatics maturity, data quality, public data access and communication, and IT adoption and use for healthcare quality improvement. I have worked with interdisciplinary teams to address these complex challenges in home healthcare and hospice, healthcare administration, and maternal health by using both qualitative and quantitative research methods.

I received my undergraduate and Master’s Degrees in Computer Engineering (Sep '92 - Dec '98) in Izmir, Turkey, where I was introduced to quality and process improvement research with a focus on organizations developing large-scale software products. I obtained my second Master's degree in Software Engineering from the Southern Methodist University (SMU), Dallas, TX, in 2002. During my Ph.D. in Computer Science at SMU, I focused on empirical software engineering research and applied various statistical and machine learning methods to facilitate focused software quality improvement initiatives tackled in large telecommunication companies such as Nortel Networks (Jan '99 - Aug '04).

As a faculty member at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (Aug '04 - Dec '21), I continued research in several areas, including empirical software engineering, software quality assurance in biomedical open-source software projects, health data de-identification, health information technology (IT) adoption and use, and data analytics to improve healthcare quality. Since 2008, health informatics, particularly, "home healthcare" informatics and IT has been my main area of interest. Over the years, I have overseen the development of a number of software products for research and improvement applications. I advised a large number of master’s and PhD students now in industry positions (Microsoft, Amazon, BlueCross BlueShield), and academic positions (Georgetown University, Kuwait University).

I am a Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). I serve as a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of American Medical Directors Association (JAMDA). Together with colleagues, I played an instrumental role in founding the Home Healthcare, Hospice, and Information and Technology (H3IT) Conference, and have served as its Organizing Chair since '14 (https://h3it.org). H3IT uniquely brings researchers and practitioners together to achieve evidence-based diffusion of informatics innovations in home health care. Since Aug '21, I have been an Associate Editor for the Learning Health Systems (LHS) Journal, responsible for the Computable Biomedical Knowledge (CBK) track.