The Team

Principal Investigator

Saif Khairat, PhD, MPH, FAMIA. With over a decade of experiences, Dr. Khairat has led national and international projects to enhance healthcare research and services, specifically within the informatics world. His efforts involved the improvement of chronic disease self-management combined with the application and sustainability of e-Health interventions. Dr. Khairat is an Associate Professor at the Carolina Health Informatics Program and the School of Nursing at UNC. He is a site PI of an NIH funded project titled “Overcoming the Barriers to Clinical Trial Recruitment through Teleconsent”. Prior to joining UNC, Dr. Khairat was Co-Principal Investigator of the Great Plains Telehealth Resource and Assistance Center, funded by HRSA, a $1 million- three-year federally funded center that is responsible for increasing Telehealth awareness and providing consultation to healthcare providers and vendors in six states.

As a health informatics expert, Dr. Khairat investigates the development, implementation, and evaluation of Health IT solutions to improve health equity and access, particularly, virtual care. He has authored over 80 influential scientific articles in more than 35 different peer-reviewed journals and conferences, and has been an investigator for more than $7.5 million in research grants over the past five years. His work has been featured in major media outlets, including the Harvard Business Review (HBR), American Medical Association (AMA), and the AHRQ Patient Safety Net (PSNET).

Dr. Khairat is immediate past-Chair of the Education Working Group, and a member of the Working Group Steering Committee at the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA).

Dr. Saif Khairat_CV

Nurse Informatician 

Jennifer Morelli, MPS, RN. Jennifer has been a nurse for nearly 10 years and finished her Master’s in Biomedical and Health Informatics at UNC in 2022. As a nurse, she worked in a variety of settings including inpatient, community health, home health, and travel nursing. Jennifer is passionate about using data and research to drive health innovation and her ultimate goal is to improve health systems for patients and clinicians. She uses her experience to provide clinical background and expertise on projects and loves diving headfirst into data analytics.

Jennifer Morelli CV

Trainees and Research Assistants

Ariana Ávila, MPH. Ariana is an Anthropology PhD Candidate at UNC Chapel Hill. Her ethnographic research looks at food and culture in order to understand health. In collaboration with a community garden, she studied food sharing as a form of care among the multicultural farmworker community in Immokalee, Florida. Currently, Ariana is pivoting into the tech industry where she is interested in applying her human-centered, equity-focused, qualitative/mixed-method design skills to improve and create innovative products for better user experiences.

John Geracitano, MS. John is a first-year PhD student in the Carolina Health Informatics Program with research interests in Virtual Care, Health Literacy, and Geospatial Disparities/Analysis. He has served in the U.S. Army for over 17 years globally, most recently as a Data Systems Engineer in the 1st Armored Division in El Paso, Texas. While his children occupy nearly all his time, he loves running competitively and reading.