Thomas Lasko, MD, PhD

Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine

Tom Lasko is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. His current research is focused on using data-driven methods to discover previously unrecognized disease phenotypes from population-scale medical records data. Prior to joining Vanderbilt, Tom was a Software Engineer at Google, where he worked on methods to identify clinically interesting patterns in the mind-bogglingly-massive Google query stream. He also worked on improving search results for medical searches, developing a completely data-driven algorithm that powers the computational diagnosis engine known as Google Symptom Search, for which he has several patents.

Tom earned an MD from UC San Diego and a PhD in Computer Science from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Octo Barnett's Laboratory of Computer Science at Massachusetts General Hospital, and a clinical internship at Gundersen Lutheran Medical Center in La Crosse, WI, where he learned about all of the ways in which those wonderfully bucolic farms will try to kill you if you set foot on them.