Our Team

Ahmed Said earned his medical degree, master’s and PhD while completing his pediatric residency and initial pediatric critical care training at Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt. During his PhD, he undertook research fellowship training at Washington University in St. Louis. Upon completion of his PhD, Said returned to Washington University and St. Louis Children’s Hospital for further training, completing a pediatric residency followed by a pediatric critical care fellowship, with advanced specialization in pediatric cardiac critical care. He joined the faculty in 2015.

Said currently serves as the medical co-director of the Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) program at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. He is also a faculty member at the Artificial Intelligence for Health Institute (AIHealth) and holds a research faculty position at the Institute for Informatics, Data Science and Biostatistics (I2DB) at Washington University in St. Louis.

His research focuses on translational biomedical informatics, particularly the integration of complex, high-volume electronic health record (EHR) data to develop machine learning models for clinical decision support. His ongoing projects include the development of predictive models to link ECMO utilization and timing with functional neurological outcomes, as well as the creation of clinical decision support tools for optimizing anticoagulation management in pediatric ECMO patients.

Aashana Dhruva Cowan is a third year pediatric critical care fellow at SLCH/Washington University in St. Louis. A native of central MA, she obtained a BA in history from Boston College, after which completed medical school at Georgetown University School of Medicine and pediatric residency training from UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, where she first began clinical effectiveness research with a focus on ECMO and interprofessional collaboration. Her main interests are in shock and resuscitation, and outside of medicine she enjoys travelling, photography and spending time hiking, camping or just enjoying a nice day in the park with her husband, infant and dog. Her current project focuses on the implementation of a standardized ECMO circuit fibrin and clot burden EHR documentation approach.

Miranda Edmunds earned both her undergraduate and medical degree from the University of Kansas. She then completed her pediatric residency training at St. Louis Children’s Hospital and served as a chief resident. Currently, she is in the final year of her pediatric critical care fellowship at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. Miranda is interested in anticoagulation and safety practices in the pediatric ECMO population. She is currently working an analysis of our institutional anticoagulation practice for pediatric VV ECMO and the development of a pilot anticoagulation predictive model to guide decision making at the bedside.

Mehul Thakkar is a clinical fellow in pediatric hematology and oncology at Washington University School of Medicine. His clinical and research interests include classical hematology particularly hemostasis-thrombosis and medical education. He is currently working with Ahmed Said, MD on clinical research studying anticoagulation outcomes with direct thrombin inhibitors in patients on VA-ECMO without a history of cardiopulmonary bypass. He is also pursuing a master’s in Health Professions Education (MHPE) at University of Missouri – Kansas City. 

Yuyao Zhuge graduated with a Master’s in Information Systems Management from WashU in Fall 2023. Aspiring to become a data scientist, he is a skilled data specialist with expertise in data analysis and machine learning. With a strong interest in large dataset processing and deep learning techniques, Yuyao has hands-on experience in Spark, computer vision, natural language processing and AI-generated content. Yuyao has worked on developing a data pipeline to link all extractable EHR based data and high-resolution telemetry data for pediatric critically ill patients into an innovative, continuously updating datamart to serve as the basis for machine learning modeling.

Jonathan Sagel is a senior at Washington University studying psychology and biology interested in pursuing a career in medicine. He is from Denver, Colorado and loves hiking, skiing and anything outdoors. Jonathan has been working on developing a comprehensive database for functional outcomes of pediatric patients supported on ECMO.

Daoyi (Oscar) Zhu is a 2nd-year PhD student at the AI for Health Institute in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University, where he also earned his bachelor’s degree. His main research interests include time series analysis, causal inference, model explainability, multimodal learning and their applications in clinical decision-making. He is focused on the validation and refining the ECMO utilization prediction models on a large multicenter national database developed in the COVID-19 pandemic with interests in adapting these models to the pediatric ECMO population.