Harry Reyes Nieva thought he was going to be a lawyer. He hadn’t really given health care a thought until he was recruited as the third employee of a health care nonprofit his friend was building out of her dorm room at Yale. That’s when he “got the health care bug.”
A first-generation college student from an immigrant family in Brooklyn, N.Y., Nieva worked while attending college and didn’t have the money to put himself through medical school. Instead, he took jobs at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and helped implement PEPFAR programs for HIV/AIDS through Harvard. Both experiences introduced him to clinical informatics, the field in which he ended up getting his Ph.D.
Nieva is now focused on using artificial intelligence and health care data to improve health outcomes for all populations. His tools crawl through data like PubMed papers, electronic health records, or insurance claims, looking for what or who is missing from medical data so researchers and public health agencies can better target resources at populations that need better treatment or more study. His work has focused on LGBTQ+ populations and diversity, equity, and inclusion in the past, and hopes to work on HPV and cervical cancer prevention in the future.
— Brittany Trang
