Education

• Ph.D., Health Informatics, University of South Carolina, 2025.
• Certificate in Artificial Intelligence, University of South Carolina, 2024.
• M.S. Computer Science, University of South Carolina, 2018.
• DABR Therapeutic Radiation Physics. American Board of Radiology, 1997.
• M.S. Medical Physics, East Carolina University, 1993.
• B.S. Dual Math and Physics, University of North Carolina-Greensboro, 1990.

Background

Dr. Denise Davis has an interdisciplinary background that spans clinical research, government healthcare decision support, and high-performance database systems. She began her career at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, where she trained as an ABR board-certified medical physicist and served as a co-investigator on NIH-funded NCI clinical trials. Her responsibilities expanded to include data management and the development of her first enterprise database system using Oracle, called RADS (Radiation Analysis and Dosimetry System). The RADS cluster data model was designed to support historical and real-time data collection from linear accelerators, cobalt-60 units, benchmark datasets from treatment planning systems, and a remote thermoluminescent dosimetry program.

Dr. Davis later transitioned to Medicare and Medicaid fraud and abuse data analytics, working in a federal data center in Atlanta. There, she applied her expertise in Oracle data warehousing and served in multiple roles, including technical lead, database architect, and systems engineer for decision support services and research and development teams.

She recently earned her PhD in Informatics from the University of South Carolina, where her dissertation focused on validating real-world data to validate the clinical relevance and data integrity before applying or processing the data and causing harm. Her current research interests include:

• Trustworthy AI and machine learning
• Research data management in healthcare
• High-performance computing (HPC) for healthcare
• Quantum computing in emerging technologies education
• Data modeling and reproducibility in real-world evidence

Dr. Davis is the Principal Investigator of an NSF ACCESS-funded course (LAUNCH) designed to train IT students in AI/ML and HPC. She serves on the South Carolina AI Design Team, the Big Data Health Science Competition Committee, and mentors students in quantum computing and AI through SC Quantum and NSF-supported platforms.

Honors and Awards

• SC25 Early Career Program Participant-support in HPC, AI/ML, Quantum, and education. 2025.
• Propel Research Program Mentee. 2025.
• Research Data Management Conference, Washington, DC, 2025.
• NSF NAIRR/AI & ACCESS Workshops, 2025.
• Received NSF-funded awards to attend national training workshops on AI/ML, HPC, and supercomputing, supporting educational and research resources.