AHI Faculty
John Chelsom, Ph.D., Program Director
John Chelsom has worked for over 30 years in the field of Health Informatics.
He qualified with a degree in Engineering Science from the University of Oxford and a PhD from City University, London, where he studied the application of artificial intelligence in medicine. He has been a Visiting Professor in Health Informatics at City University, London and is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Victoria, Canada. He is a consultant for the World Bank where he is an invited expert on Telemedicine, publishing a handbook for Rural Telemedicine in Ukraine.
In the 1990's he was heavily involved in the application of open standards for structured information in the publishing, automotive and healthcare sectors. He started a company which developed the first web-based Electronic Health Records (EHR) product deployed in the England's National Health Service (NHS). This product went on to form the foundation of the Summary Care Record in England's National Health Service, starting in 2004.
As well as EHR systems, John was also responsible for the first online versions of the BMJ's Clinical Evidence product, the first XML production system for the British National Formulary and was a proposer of the Open Document Format for Office Applications.
In 2010, he started the Open Health Informatics research programme at City University, London. This research led to the development of the open source cityEHR – an ontology-based health records system, based on open standards, interfaces and development practices. cityEHR is now deployed as an operational EHR in several hospitals in England and is used for teaching students in health informatics.
Meghan Aileen Lockard, Ph.D., P.M.P, Associate Dean for Allied Health Professions
Dr. Meghan Aileen Lockard is a scientist, educator, entrepreneur, community advocate, and Willa’s mom. She is currently the Associate Dean and Director of Allied Health Professions at Fordham University, and the Chief Executive Officer of Vigil Health, a virtual-first healthcare platform that integrates diagnostics, pharmacy fulfillment, and telemedicine on a blockchain based data architecture to provide patients with cost-effective, convenient, and accessible healthcare regardless of insurance status.
Meghan completed a multidisciplinary Ph.D. at the Rockefeller University, using methodologies from genetics, molecular biology, systems neuroscience, behavior, and evolutionary biology to understand how animals have evolved to fall in love. After graduating, she became a Professor of Natural Sciences at Fordham University, teaching everyone’s favorite, “easy-A” classes: Physics and Physiology. While teaching, she also completed a Data Science Fellowship with INSIGHT, where she created an app that used a machine-learning algorithm trained on national crime data to predict the probability of stalking behavior escalating to more serious, life threatening crimes. She also cofounded and authored a successful SBIR for Hepione Therapeutics, an immunotherapeutics company that is developing a vaccine prophylactic to the synthetic opioid fentanyl and its derivatives.
A proud denizen of the South Bronx, Meghan found herself in one the zip codes hardest hit by the 2020 COVID Pandemic in the United States. Devastated by seeing her neighbors and community unnecessarily suffer, she followed the advice of one of her idols, Mr. Rogers, and “looked for the helpers.” This got her involved in a number of community-driven, crowd-sourced data challenges and hackathons to fill the gaps in knowledge and technology in the US’s public health response. She also began volunteering locally for two local non-profits: South Bronx Unite and the Mott Haven Community Land Trust, both of which she now serves as a member of the advisory board. Two other major projects came from these efforts. One was that she met Dr. Anthony Chang, pediatric cardiologist and founder of AIMed, a professional society dedicated to upskilling healthcare practitioners in cutting edge Digital Health. Meghan is currently on the Editorial Board for Intelligence-based Medicine, the peer-reviewed, open-source journal of AIMed. Another was her second company, Wellstand Health, which developed bespoke COVID-19 testing programs that guaranteed PCR results in 36 hours from anywhere in the country. Wellstand's clients included state governments, sports franchises, broadway production companies, metropolitan school districts, federal agencies, and networks of senior/assisted living facilities, to name a few.
Meghan left Wellstand Health to found Vigil Health in November 2023, where she has developed a fully virtual platform to get at-risk populations on HIV-PrEP. In September 2024, she became the Associate Dean and Director of Allied Health Professions at Fordham, where she continues her work of improving access and equity to high quality healthcare in underserved areas of the Bronx and Westchester County. When not working, she enjoys going on biking adventures in the city with her 9 year old daughter, riding horses through the glacial erratics of Pelham Bay Park, or tending to the local community garden’s chickens, bees, vegetable patches, and flower gardens.
Naveed Dogar, Faculty
Naveed Dogar completed her undergraduate degree in Biomedical Informatics at St. George’s Medical School where the focus of her dissertation was on Biometrics. She then went on to complete her Masters in Health Informatics at City University, London. The topic of her Masters dissertation was ‘Clinician-led Development of an Open Source EHR’, whereby a simple spreadsheet was used as a tool for clinicians to design and deploy their own enterprise-scale health records systems. She presented her work at the Royal Society of Medicine, the International Clubfoot conference and at ITCH, an IT and healthcare conference in Victoria, Canada. Naveed also won an excellence in education award by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community for attaining a distinction and graduating 2nd highest in her cohort. After graduating, she continued her final project in collaboration with staff at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London, to deliver an open source Electronic Healthcare Record (EHR) for the clubfoot clinic.
She was employed as a clinical analyst on projects implementating open source EHR systems at Nottingham University Hospital and at the Nuffield Orthopadic Centre in Oxford, where the EHR continues to support the Fracture Liaison Service as a tool for both routine clinical care and clinical research studies.
Naveed is currently undertaking a DPhil at the University of Oxford, where her work focuses on the internationalisation of open source EHRs, combining her research studies with being a mother to two young boys.
She also serves as a vice chair for the Ahmadiyya Muslim Women’s research association, which encourages young muslim women to pursue research STEM careers. Her aspirations are to increase access to basic healthcare needs in developing countries.
Stephanie Cabrera, Faculty
Stephanie Cabrera obtained her Bachelor of Science in Nursing in 2014 from McGill University. She has been working as a Registered Nurse for six years in critical care units in Houston, Vancouver, and Montreal. While working in these technologically complex environments, Stephanie observed the value of well-designed health information technology to better support clinical practice and delivery of safe patient care. The need for optimizing these systems motivated her to pursue a combined Master of Health Information Science and Master of Nursing at the University of Victoria, completing in 2023.
Most recently, Stephanie has worked in Vancouver (Canada) and Oxford (United Kingdom) through various co-op programs. In Vancouver, she helped with the planning and implementation of an Electronic Health Record (EHR) at a rural community hospital and tertiary-care center. In Oxford, she built an open-source EHR application for a Fracture Prevention Clinic, with a focus on features for internationalization, tested in English, Spanish and Mandarin. Stephanie continues to work on the design, development, and implementation of open-source EHRs in diverse healthcare settings.
In her free time, she enjoys running, skiing, hiking, camping, cooking, and learning languages.
Gary Cornelius, Faculty
Gary Cornelius is a healthcare solution specialist with over twenty-five years development and consultancy expertise, gained across professional services and product engineering (healthcare, media, government, retail and banking). He is a firm believer in designing around user first principles, intuitive interface, and discoverability.
Gary's areas of expertise include: Internet of Things; information architecture/design; network architecture/design; Big Data; document analysis & processing; systems integration/middleware; application performance management; DevOpps/full-stack development; Internet technology (TCP/IP, Email, HTTP, MQTT, HTML etc.); Linux System Admin; software coding technology; RF technology (WIFI, LoRaWAN; Cellular, BLE, Zigbee, Z-wave etc.); XML technology; Electronic Health Records (EHR); Artifical Intelligence; firmware/services development (Zephyr/Arduino); PCB/sensor design; and teaching.
On the Applied Health Informatics program, Gary manages the virtual server environment used by students in their practical coursework and mentors students as they explore the practical application of the knowledge gained in class.
James B. Couch, M.D., J.D., FACPE, Former Director & Accreditation Advisor, MSHA Degree Program, Adjunct Professor, M.S. in Health Administration, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences (GSAS)
Dr. Couch earned a J.D. from the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University, and an M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. He has devoted his 45 year career as both a senior executive for major healthcare provider and payer organizations applying the latest information technologies to improve the demonstrable quality, safety, efficiency, effectiveness, equity and value of healthcare delivery.
He has taught health policy, quality improvement, patient safety, medical risk management and value-based purchasing at Penn’s Medical and Wharton Schools, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, NYU’s Business and Public Policy Schools, SUNY’s Watson School of Engineering, UConn, Jefferson’s College of Population Health, Harvard, Yale, and Oxford Universities (Wolfson, Green-Templeton & St. Edmund’s Hall Colleges, the last of which being where he currently teaches Fordham M.S. in Applied Health Informatics students Health Data Analytics Leadership every September). He is also a fellow of the Global Healthcare Innovation Management Center at Fordham University’s Gabelli School of Business.
