Sherry Kausch, PHD

Sherry Kausch is a data scientist. BS in Psychology from James Madison University and MA in Psychology from Wake Forest University. She received her MSN in Nursing, MSDS in Data Science, and Ph.D. in Nursing from the University of Virginia.

Dr. Kausch’s research focuses primarily on clinical prediction modeling. She has 12 years of clinical experience as a registered nurse in both inpatient and outpatient settings and, as a doctoral student, focused her dissertation research on the novel uses of predictive models in the PICU population. As a data scientist in UVA’s Department of Pediatrics, Dr. Kausch’s work centers on developing clinical prediction models using cardiorespiratory data in the NICU population. 

During her pre-doctoral work, Dr. Kausch used stochastic modeling to characterize the illness dynamics of PICU patients with sepsis. She and her team of researchers found that using information-theoretical approaches to characterize illness trajectories offered a novel way to assess the complexity of a disease course. Using entropy to characterize illness dynamics provided additional information in conjunction with a status assessment of illness severity. In her work on developing novel uses of machine learning models for sepsis prediction, Dr. Kausch reviewed these prediction models in hospitalized adults. There, she highlighted differences in sepsis definitions, time of onset, methods for identification, modeling methods, and data—all of these findings infrared her current work in developing similar prediction models in the NICU population.