Dr. Emily R. Pfaff received her Masters in Information Science and her PhD in Clinical and Health Informatics, both from the University of North Carolina (UNC). Since 2011, Dr. Pfaff has served in multiple roles in the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute (NC TraCS), UNC's CTSA. Dr. Pfaff is currently NC TraCS Co-Director for Informatics and Data Science. She is also Associate Director of UNC Chapel Hill School of Medicine's Program on Clinical and Health Informatics. Dr. Pfaff has an academic appointment as Research Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Endocrinology & Metabolism at UNC Chapel Hill School of Medicine. Dr. Pfaff is nationally known for her work and leadership in the National Covid Cohort Collaborative (N3C), now known as the N3C COVID Enclave. The N3C COVID Enclave is the largest data enclave of de-identified, individual-level clinical data available for COVID-19 research. Dr. Pfaff and others are piloting additional data enclaves as part of the expansion of N3C, the National Clinical Cohort Collaborative.
Recent Publications
- Pfaff, E, Schramm, K, Blattner-Johnson, M, Jones, BC, Stark, S, Balasubramanian, GP, Previti, C, Autry, RJ, Fiesel, P, Sahm, F et al.. Pediatric spinal high-grade glioma in the pediatric precision oncology registry INFORM: Identification of potential therapeutic targets. Neurooncol Adv 2025; 7 (1): vdae185. PubMed PMID:39896072 PubMed Central PMC11783565.
- Bhatia, A, Preiss, AJ, Xiao, X, Brannock, MD, Alexander, GC, Chew, RF, Davis, H, Fitzgerald, M, Hill, E, Kelly, EP et al.. Effect of nirmatrelvir/ritonavir (Paxlovid) on hospitalization among adults with COVID-19: An electronic health record-based target trial emulation from N3C. PLoS Med 2025; 22 (1): e1004493. PubMed PMID:39823513 PubMed Central PMC11790232.
- Martin, B, DeWitt, PE, Russell, S, Haendel, M, Sanchez-Pinto, N, Albers, DJ, Jhaveri, RR, Moffitt, R, Bennett, TD, N3C Consortium et al.. The Recent Increase in Invasive Bacterial Infections: A Report From the National COVID Cohort Collaborative. Pediatr Infect Dis J 2024; : . PubMed PMID:39736073 .
- Hung, P, Yu, J, Harrison, SE, Liu, J, Promiti, A, Odahowski, C, Campbell, BA, Chatterjee, A, Boghoossian, NS, Cai, B et al.. Racial and Ethnic and Rural Variations in the Use of Hybrid Prenatal Care in the US. JAMA Netw Open 2024; 7 (12): e2449243. PubMed PMID:39641928 PubMed Central PMC11624583.
- Lamoureux, AA, Fisher, MJ, Lemelle, L, Pfaff, E, Amir-Yazdani, P, Kramm, C, De Wilde, B, Kazanowska, B, Hutter, C, Pfister, SM et al.. Clinical Characteristics and Outcomes of Central Nervous System Tumors Harboring NTRK Gene Fusions. Clin Cancer Res 2025; 31 (3): 561-572. PubMed PMID:39625867 PubMed Central PMC11788648.
- Walters, KM, Clark, M, Dard, S, Hong, SS, Kelly, E, Kostka, K, Lee, AM, Miller, RT, Morris, M, Palchuk, MB et al.. National COVID Cohort Collaborative data enhancements: a path for expanding common data models. J Am Med Inform Assoc 2025; 32 (2): 391-397. PubMed PMID:39579089 PubMed Central PMC11756694.
- Tan, ALM, Gonçalves, RS, Yuan, W, Brat, GA, Gentleman, R, Kohane, IS, Consortium for Clinical Characterization of COVID-19 by EHR (4CE) . Implications of mappings between International Classification of Diseases clinical diagnosis codes and Human Phenotype Ontology terms. JAMIA Open 2024; 7 (4): ooae118. PubMed PMID:39559493 PubMed Central PMC11570992.
- Wang, WK, Jeong, H, Hershkovich, L, Cho, P, Singh, K, Lederer, L, Roghanizad, AR, Shandhi, MMH, Kibbe, W, Dunn, J et al.. Tree-based classification model for Long-COVID infection prediction with age stratification using data from the National COVID Cohort Collaborative. JAMIA Open 2024; 7 (4): ooae111. PubMed PMID:39524607 PubMed Central PMC11547948.
- Vinson, AJ, Anzalone, AJ, Schissel, M, Dai, R, Olex, AL, Mannon, RB, National COVID Cohort Collaborative. Association of COVID-19 With Risk of Posttransplant Diabetes Mellitus. Transplantation 2024; : . PubMed PMID:39531312 .
- O'Neil, ST, Madlock-Brown, C, Wilkins, KJ, McGrath, BM, Davis, HE, Assaf, GS, Wei, H, Zareie, P, French, ET, Loomba, J et al.. Finding Long-COVID: temporal topic modeling of electronic health records from the N3C and RECOVER programs. NPJ Digit Med 2024; 7 (1): 296. PubMed PMID:39433942 PubMed Central PMC11494196.
