About us
The Greater Plains Collaborative (GPC) is a network of fourteen leading medical centers in nine states committed to
a shared vision of improving healthcare delivery through ongoing learning, adoption of evidence-based practices,
and active research dissemination. It is one of the Clinical Research Networks (CRNs) in The National Patient-Center
Clinical Research Network (PCORnet®), funded by Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI®) to focus on
comparative effectiveness research. Our network brings together a diverse population of over 38 million
patients across 1,550 miles covering 8 states with a combined area of 721,907 square miles.
Mission: To align our members clinical and translational science capacity with PCORnet® to contribute to national definitive studies and
allow our campus(es) to generalize their research regionally and nationally.
Our Partner Institutions
Our Leadership Team
James McClay, MD
GPC Principal Investigator
University of Missouri - School of Medicine
Dr. McClay is a Chief Research Informatics Officer for the School of Medicine, with academic home in HMI, alongside a concurrent appointment with the Department of Emergency Medicine. Dr. McClay joined from the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) where served as Professor, with research/professional interests in Clinical Informatics, Information Standards in Emergency Medicine, and Comparative Effectiveness Research. Dr. McClay serves as co-chair of the HLT Emergency Care Work Group (ECWG), which led the ECWG in the creation of the EDIS-Functional Profile, the DEEDS specification, and the EC DAM informative ballot. He has o worked closely with the emergency medicine specialty society to continue to expand the portfolio of Emergency Care related standards, support the FHIR clinical initiatives, and represent the emergency care community in HL7 projects.
Bradley Taylor, PhD
GPC Principal Investigator
Medical College of Wisconsin
Bradley Taylor is the Chief Research Informatics Officer at the Medical College of Wisconsin, where he leads Biomedical Informatics for the Clinical and Translational Science Institute of Southeast Wisconsin. He and his team integrate information technology systems, electronic health records, clinical databases, and tissue repositories throughout CTSI’s partner institutions to support clinical and translational research.
Elizabeth Chrischilles, PhD
GPC Principal Investigator
University of Iowa
Dr. Chrischilles, professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Director of its Health Effectiveness Research Center, holds the Pomerantz Chair in Public Health in the University of Iowa College of Public Health. Dr. Chrischilles is Associate Director for Population Sciences in the University’s Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Lindsay Cowell, PhD
Site Principal Investigator
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
Dr. Cowell has built a research program focused on the development of bioinformatics and computational biology methods for studying the immune system and infections diseases. In particular, her work has focused on the somatic diversification of antigen receptor-encoding genes and the development of computable representations of qualitative biological and clinical information. Within each of these areas, she has developed projects that emphasize methodologic developments as well as projects focused on answering specific biological questions.
Nicholas Anderson, PhD
Site Principal Investigator
University of California Davis
Dr. Anderson, is Professor and Division Chief of Health Informatics at UC Davis School of Medicine and holds the Robert D. Cardiff Professorship of Informatics Research. He directs informatics for the UC Davis Clinical and Translational Science Center, serves as Associate Director of CITRIS Health, and is a 2024 AMIA Fellow. As PI of the Greater Plains Collaborative Phase 4 Clinical Network in PCORnet, Dr. Anderson advances participant-centric, federated data ecosystems for patient-centered outcomes research. His work focuses on data governance, privacy-preserving linkage, interoperability (e.g., FHIR), data quality, and AI/ML decision support for real-world evidence and pragmatic trials. He also teaches graduate informatics courses, co-leads workforce development initiatives, and serves as Senior Editor for the Journal of Precision Medicine.
Kirk Knowlton, MD
Site Principal Investigator
Intermountain Healthcare
Dr. Kirk Knowlton went to Intermountain Heart Institute in January 2016 from the University of California, San Diego, where he served as the Chief of Cardiology and Vice-Chair of Medicine for Laboratory Research. Throughout his career, he has had a strong interest in understanding how and why patients develop heart failure. This includes abnormalities in DNA, infections of the heart like viral myocarditis, and the role of immune function in heart cells that affect cardiac performance.
Jeffrey VanWormer, PhD
Site Principal Investigator
Marshfield Clinic Research Institute
Dr. VanWormer is a behavioral epidemiologist with research interests in the primary prevention of chronic diseases, with a particular focus on community-level surveillance and lifestyle interventions. For the past 12 years, he has worked at the Marshfield Clinic Research Institute as a Research Scientist in the Center for Clinical Epidemiology & Population Health. He has led and assisted with many health promotion and disparities projects focused on obesity, medication use, and vaccinations, among others.
Meredith Zozus, PhD
Site Principal Investigator
University of Texas Science Center at San Antonio
Dr. Meredith Zozus recently joined the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UTHSCSA) Long School of Medicine as the Director for Clinical Research Informatics and the Clinical Informatics Research Division Chief. Prior to joining UTHSCSA, Zozus was associate professor of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS).
Carol Geary, PhD
Site Principal Investigator
University of Nebraska Medical Center
Dr. Geary is an assistant professor in the Department of Pathology & Microbiology at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Her work has two methodological foci: creation and use of de-identified electronic health record data for research purposes and patient and stakeholder engagement in research. She has worked to develop the relationship networks and expertise to support researchers with interest in patient engagement in their research.
Abbey Sidebottom, PhD
Site Principal Investigator
Allina Health
Abbey Sidebottom is a Principal Research Scientist at Allina Health. Dr. Sidebottom holds an MPH and PhD in epidemiology from the University of Minnesota. Dr. Sidebottom has worked at Allina Health since 2009. Dr. Sidebottom currently leads the Care Delivery Research department which conducts investigator initiated research focused on evaluating models of care, improving patient outcomes, and improving health equity.
Douglas Bell, MD, PhD
Site Principal Investigator
University of California Los Angeles
Douglas Bell, MD, PhD leads the CTSI Biomedical Informatics Program, which serves as UCLA’s honest broker for research use of electronic health record data. His ongoing research includes work on clinical decision support, managing data quality, governing data sharing, and patient outreach particularly for research recruitment. He is also the program director of UCLA’s ACGME-accredited fellowship program in the subspecialty of clinical informatics. His past research has contributed to the fields of electronic prescribing, clinical decision support, and online physician education, among others.
Elmer Bernstam, MD, MSE
Site Principal Investigator
UTHealth Houston
Elmer Bernstam, MD, MSE, holds the joint appointment of professor at UTHealth School of Biomedical Informatics (SBMI), where he also serves as associate dean for research, and at McGovern Medical School. Bernstam is also the director of the Biomedical Informatics Group at UTHealth’s Center for Clinical and Translational Sciences (CCTS). His research focuses on clinical and translational informatics, specifically on information retrieval, consumer informatics and clinical decision support.
Albert Lai, PhD
Site Principal Investigator
Washington University, St.Louis
Albert M. Lai, PhD, is the Deputy Director for the Institute for Informatics, Data Science, and Biostatistics, the Chief Research Information Officer for the School of Medicine, and a Professor of Medicine in the Division of General Medical Sciences at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Dr. Lai specializes in the development of research informatics infrastructure and is well recognized in the fields of clinical research informatics and consumer health informatics. His recent research has focused on the application of natural language processing to a wide variety of applications, including clinical trial prescreening and de-identification of qualitative research data.
Sravani Chandaka, PhD
Site Principal Investigator
Kansas University Medical Center, Kansas City
Sravani Chandaka, MS is the Director of Research Information Technology at University of Kansas Medical Center.
Brad H. Pollock, PhD
Site Co-Investigator
University of California Davis
Brad Pollock, PhD, MPH, FACE is Distinguished Professor and Chair of Public Health Sciences at UC Davis School of Medicine and Chair of the Graduate Group in Public Health Sciences. A Fellow of the American College of Epidemiology, he is Principal Investigator of the NCI-funded Children’s Oncology Group NCORP Research Base, leading studies on childhood and adolescent cancer epidemiology and control. Dr. Pollock has held national leadership roles with the NCI Cancer Care Delivery Research Steering Committee and the NIH CTSA Consortium. From 2020–2022, he chaired the UC Systemwide Public Health COVID-19 Workgroup and directed Healthy Davis Together, a large-scale community COVID-19 response initiative.
Jordan King, PhD
Site Principal Investigator
University of Utah
Jordan King, PharmD, MS, is an Associate Professor in Health System Innovation and Research, Department of Population Health Sciences, University of Utah School of Medicine, and Affiliate Investigator at the Institute for Health Research, Kaiser Permanente Colorado. Dr. King’s research primarily focuses on improving medication use in the context of cardiovascular disease prevention and anticoagulation management through team-based care and innovative health services interventions, including implementation of digital health tools to improve shared decision making, address misinformation, and facilitate patient self-management.
Stacey Knight, PhD
Site Co- Principal Investigator
Intermountain Health
Stacey Knight, PhD, MStat, is a Professor of Research at Intermountain Health. She is a genetic and cardiovascular epidemiology who seeks to integrates clinical and genetic data to advance medical knowledge and care. She is the PI for the Intermountain HerediGene Population Study a collaborative project with deCODE genetics sponsored by Amgen. HerediGene has prospectively collected and genotyped samples from over 200,000 Intermountain Health patients. Her diverse and unique skill set, including data and bioinformatic analytics, statistical and genetic epidemiology, and study oversight.