Faculty & Staff

Heather Lyu, M.D., M.B.I.
Program Director
Assistant Professor of Surgical Oncology

Heather Lyu, M.D., M.B.I., is an Assistant Professor of Surgical Oncology at UT MD Anderson and Director of the Department of Surgical Oncology Clinical Research Informatics Program. Her clinical practice focuses on the multidisciplinary care of patients with soft-tissue sarcomas. She received her medical degree from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and completed her surgical training at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, MA, followed by a fellowship in Complex General Surgical Oncology at UT MD Anderson. She also completed training in Clinical Informatics at Brigham and Women's Hospital and obtained her Master of Biomedical Informatics degree from Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Lyu's research sits at the intersection of surgical oncology and clinical informatics, with a focus on building next-generation data infrastructure to support high-quality cancer research. She led the development of an integrated, prospective data system that unifies structured clinical documentation with advanced analytics platforms, enabling the capture of rich, longitudinal patient data at scale. A central component of her work is harnessing artificial intelligence — including large language models — to extract nuanced clinical variables from clinical documentation that are otherwise inaccessible through traditional data collection methods. These efforts span tumor characteristics, treatment details and long-term oncologic outcomes such as recurrence. By combining purpose-built data architecture with AI-driven data capture, Dr. Lyu's program aims to accelerate surgical oncology research, improve the precision of outcome prediction and ultimately advance the care of patients with complex malignancies.

Cong Pan, Ph.D. 
Research Programmer

Cong Pan, Ph.D., has a background in software development, data analysis and data management. She has experience developing complex numerical computation applications for gene-environment interaction studies. She is currently developing and maintaining databases and programs for automating clinical data management, supporting departmental operations. Dr. Pan is interested in applying machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to support the data analysis of clinical research projects.

Laura Prakash, M.D.
Research Scientist

Laura Prakash, M.D., has a background in laboratory and clinical research and data analysis. She has 10 years of experience in clinical research with a focus on pancreatic and periampullary malignancies. She currently assists with collecting and analyzing clinical data, utilizing electronic health record reporting tools, writing protocols, preparing abstracts and manuscripts for publication and managing the departmental multidisciplinary pancreas database. Dr. Prakash is interested in optimizing automated data abstraction for improved data quality and efficiency.

Kever Lewis, M.D. 
T32 Research Fellow
Dr. Lewis is working on implementing AI to improve clinical trial enrollment. 

Ashlee Seldomridege, M.D. 
T32 Research Fellow
Dr. Seldomridege is working on the utilization of large language models (LLMs) to improve data collection for patients with peritoneal surface malignancies. 

Neha Malik, M.D.
T32 Fellow
Dr. Malik is working on how to automate and extract real world data for patients with soft tissue sarcoma by implementing structured data workflows.