Our Fellows

Josh Eassa, MD first became interested in clinical informatics while in medical school at the University of Chicago. He spent a year supporting the UChicago Medicine CMIO on several projects. He completed his residency in Family Medicine at LewisGale medical center. Josh then returned to Chicago to work as PCP, prior to returning to Virginia to for the Clinical Informatics Fellowship at the University of Virginia. Josh is interested in evaluating the application of information systems and technologies in healthcare. In his free time, Josh enjoys exploring Virginia, hiking, and making kefir.

Tim Layng, DO, Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine, University of Virginia 

I am originally from Pennsylvania and received my undergraduate degree from a small college in Bethlehem called Moravian, where I was also on the track and field team. I headed down to VCOM in Blacksburg for medical school, and Virginia has held on to me ever since. I completed my emergency medicine residency at VCU in Richmond where I served as a chief resident. I developed an interest in Clinical Informatics while at VCU and was very excited to complete my fellowship in CI here! Throughout my fellowship, I was involved in a variety of projects that spanned all aspects of informatics including clinical decision support, Epic certifications, database training, and SQL, quality improvement, and telemedicine via implementation of Virtual Urgent Care. I’ve enjoyed working with everyone here at UVA and am very excited to stay on as faculty in the Department of Emergency Medicine.

Bryan Thorne M.D., Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Virginia and Director of Clinical Informatics at Fortify Children’s Health
I am originally from southwest Virginia by way of Virginia Tech (Go Hokies!!!). I completed my MD/PhD at UVA in Biomedical Engineering, and went on to complete my residency in Pediatrics and fellowship in Clinical Informatics here as well. Clinical Informatics gives me the opportunity to improve the lives of my colleagues and patients through innovative use of technology and the EHR. At UVA I attend in our pediatric teaching clinic and the newborn nursery, and I spend my informatics time doing clinical decision support. During my Clinical Informatics fellowship I worked with a new pediatric clinically integrated network (CIN) called Fortify Children’s Health, founded by UVA and Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters, and I now serve as the Director of Clinical Informatics for Fortify. Fortify does value-based contracting with insurers and has more than 150,000 pediatric lives under contract. In my role there I direct EHR onboarding and integration for our population health platform, as well as oversee a 5-person reporting and analytics team.

Moria Smith M.D., MPH.

I grew up in Danville, VA, and majored in biology and religious studies at the University of Virginia. I earned my Master of Public Health and went to medical school at UVA, followed by a residency in emergency medicine. I did biomedical informatics work in biomedical engineering and neuroimmunology labs prior to and during medical school. During residency, I realized clinical informatics is a great way to combine my research interests with my clinical interests. I have greatly enjoyed working closely with Dr. Tim Layng and the other CI faculty on projects covering the breadth of CI including clinical decision support, building Epic tools, extracting and analyzing data from the electronic health record, quality improvement, and more. I also work as an attending physician in the Emergency Department.

Claire Davis, MD

Claire Davis, MD, is a pulmonary and critical care medicine physician with Scripps Green and Scripps Memorial Hospital in San Diego. Her research interests include optimizing the electronic medical record to improve delivery and quality of care. During her fellowship, she worked closely with the data science team and quality improvement coaches to develop and implement a digital critical care bundle display, which was then implemented in the MICU, STICU, CVICU and CCU. In her free time, Dr. Davis enjoys traveling, exercising, and spending time with her family in beautiful San Diego.