Clinical Informatics Current Fellows and Alumni

Marshall Frieden, MD

Marshall is from Friendswood, Texas. He attended the University of Texas at Austin for his undergraduate studies where he studied Biology before going on to complete medical school at the University of Queensland – Ochsner Clinical School in Brisbane and New Orleans.  During medical school, he performed population health research using Epic SlicerDicer, and learned how impactful clinical informatics could be in aiding and improving clinical practice. Marshall loved the food and culture of New Orleans and stayed to complete his residency in Family Medicine at East Jefferson General Hospital (EJGH) which is affiliated with Tulane University. During his residency, EJGH switched electronic health records (EHR) and saw the dramatic impact an EHR can have on a physician’s practice. Marshall actively worked with residency and hospital leadership to aid in this transition, which cemented his desire to pursue a fellowship in clinical informatics. He was also fortunate to get to participate in the implementation and research of Epic’s machine learning sepsis algorithm and a novel suite of clinical decision support tools to better detect and treat patients with sepsis at Ochsner Health during his residency. Marshall’s professional interests include improving physician wellbeing through optimizing the usability of EHR’s and the utilization of artificial intelligence in medicine to help patients and health care providers. In his free time, Marshall enjoys running, golf, travel, and attempting to surf now that he lives in the lovely coastal city of San Diego.

Nico Kahl, MD

Undergraduate: UC Santa Barbara
Medical School: UC Irvine
Residency: UC San Diego

Dr. Nicolas Kahl was born in Liguria, Italy and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. After attending the University of California Santa Barbara, he graduated summa cum laude with distinction in the major of Biology and minor of Italian Studies. During his undergraduate studies he completed an internship at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco. He worked as an emergency department medical scribe at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital for 2 years after university, which sparked his interest in the field of emergency medicine. Subsequently Dr. Kahl attended the University of California Irvine School of Medicine, where he was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha Medical Honor Society. Match day brought excitement at the opportunity to pursue residency training at UC San Diego Health's Emergency Medicine program. During residency Dr. Kahl served as Chief Resident of Education, to curate and lead the weekly departmental educational conference. While training in emergency medicine amidst a global pandemic, Dr. Kahl's interest in clinical informatics and telehealth were kindled as patients and healthcare systems were forced to adapt to a revolution in virtual care. After completing his Epic Physician Power User certification during residency, he decided to pursue fellowship training in Clinical Informatics. Dr. Kahl is humbled and thrilled to have the opportunity to train in Clinical Informatics at UC San Diego Health during a dynamic era in the field. His professional interests include telehealth best practices, applied artificial intelligence in healthcare, machine learning and large language models, electronic medical record optimization, cybersecurity, lean process improvement, and medical education. He enjoys playing beach volleyball, swimming, biking, and traveling with his significant other in his free time. Dr. Kahl is an avid San Francisco Giants fan.

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.

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!!!