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 MD Anderson. 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 the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. She completed a fellowship in complex general surgical oncology at MD Anderson and training in clinical informatics at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and obtained her master’s degree in biomedical informatics at Harvard Medical School.
Her research focuses on methods to improve clinical research through applied informatics. Specifically, she is interested in the development of data standards and implementation of structured data entry and the utilization of natural language processing (NLP) to extract clinical endpoints. She leads the Department of Surgical Oncology Clinical Research Informatics Program. She is also on the Internal Advisory Council for the MD Anderson Institute for Data Science in Oncology (IDSO).
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. Cong 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. Laura is interested in optimizing automated data abstraction for improved data quality and efficiency.