Clinical Informatics Current Fellows and Alumni

Eileen Kim, MD

Undergraduate: Georgia Institute of Technology
Medical School: Medical College of Georgia
Residency: Rutgers New Jersey Medical School

Eileen was born in New Jersey, and also grew up in South Korea, California, Washington, and Georgia. She studied biology at Georgia Tech where she started becoming more interested in the technology behind medicine, minored in economics, worked at health tech startups, and graduated with highest honors. She moved to Wisconsin to work at Epic in technical services for two years, learning the complexities and possibilities of electronic health records. At the Medical College of Georgia, she researched applications of machine learning on cancer and diabetes -omics data and planned on pursuing hematology-oncology fellowship. To spend time closer to most of her family, she moved back to New Jersey and started internal medicine residency at Rutgers. She rotated between a safety net hospital, a private hospital, and a VA hospital, each with a different electronic health record, and deeply experienced the complexities and possibilities of medical information technology. She realized she needed informatics to be a part of her career and is ecstatic to dedicate her time to the field at UC San Diego. Her interests include the application of data science to medicine (necessitating data discretization and cleaning, and including predictive analytics, clinical decision support, natural language processing, large language models, and other artificial intelligence). In her free time, she enjoys painting, reading (currently Misbehaving by Richard Thaler), swimming, accumulating plants, and exploring new things with her baby and husband.

Ruth Laverde, MD

Undergraduate: Florida International University
Medical School: UC San Francisco
Residency: UC San Diego

Ruth is a proud first-generation college graduate, born in Peru and raised in Miami, Florida. She earned her degree in biochemistry from Florida International University, graduating summa cum laude. During her undergraduate years, she worked as a Patient Navigator at a free clinic and conducted preventive health research, sparking her passion for equity-driven care.

She earned her medical degree from UCSF, where she co-founded a medical Spanish elective, helped develop the Global Surgery & Health Equity curriculum, and conducted research with the Center for Health Equity in Surgery and Anesthesia (CHESA). Her scholarly work spans pediatric surgical access, health systems strengthening, implementation evaluations, and the integration of social vulnerability indices into surgical outcomes research. She has co-authored multiple peer-reviewed publications and presented nationally in surgical and global health forums.

Now a general surgery resident at UC San Diego, Ruth’s informatics interests center on leveraging data to advance perioperative equity, surgical quality improvement, and documentation efficiency. She is particularly focused on building EHR-integrated risk stratification tools and embedding language concordance and social drivers of health into surgical workflows.

Outside the hospital, Ruth enjoys weightlifting, creating art, sewing, hiking, and exploring.”

Zach Pope, MD, MPH

Undergraduate: Rhodes College
Medical School: University of Tenessee University of Tenessee
Graduate School: Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Residency: UC Davis

 Zach is from Marietta, GA. He majored in neuroscience at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, before advancing to the University of Tennessee for medical school. He then earned an MPH with a focus on Healthcare Management and Policy from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. During this time, Zach co-founded a startup aimed at improving medical culture and mitigating physician burnout. His medical journey continued at UC Davis, where he completed his residency in Family Medicine, serving as a chief resident and board member for the California Academy of Family Physicians. While at UC Davis, he also completed a Clinician Health and Well-Being fellowship and was selected for the AMIA 25 x 5 Task Force, which aims to reduce documentation burden in healthcare. Zach completed additional training in Lifestyle and Functional Medicine, with a focus on implementation in underserved communities. Drawn to clinical informatics by its potential to enhance health equity, physician well-being, and preventive medicine, Zach is especially interested in predictive modeling, remote health monitoring, and electronic medical record optimization. Outside of the hospital, he enjoys funky live music, plant-based cooking, and all forms of movement. He’s thrilled to finally live in his favorite city and join the UCSD Clinical Informatics team!!!