Sena Chae, PhD, MSHI, RN
Sena Chae is an assistant professor at the University of Iowa College of Nursing, where she has served since 2022. With nearly a decade of experience as a perioperative nurse, she bridges clinical expertise with cutting-edge informatics research.
Dr. Chae’s interdisciplinary scholarship integrates nursing informatics, symptom science, and machine learning to transform electronic health record data into actionable insights. She develops and validates natural language processing and predictive models to improve risk prediction and clinical decision support, with a focus on patients with cancer and heart failure. Dr. Chae’s research has been supported by the National Institute of Nursing Research, the University of Iowa Office of the Vice President for Research, and the College of Nursing. She has led multiple funded studies on symptom documentation and predictive modeling in acute myeloid leukemia, with publications in leading journals such as the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics, and the Journal of Advanced Nursing.
Dr. Chae has published nearly 30 peer-reviewed articles and received recognition including the 2025 Midwest Nursing Research Society (MNRS) Health Systems, Policy, and Informatics Research Publication Award. She teaches graduate-level courses, including Clinical Data Management and Evaluation and the Doctor of Nursing Practice Project sequence, while also mentoring students across nursing and computer science. In addition, Dr. Chae serves as section editor for Nurse Leader and as chair of the MNRS Health Systems, Policy, and Informatics Research Interest Group.
- Data-Driven Symptom Science in Cancer and Chronic Disease
- Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning for Symptom and Risk Factor Extraction
- Clinical Decision Support and Informatics-Based Intervention Design
- Integration of Standardized Nursing Terminologies into Predictive Analytics
