Hi! I’m Ashton. My research interests lie broadly in language technologies and their application to the healthcare domain. My current work revolves around building intelligent and efficient systems to allow clinicians to interface with unstructured data stored in the electronic health record. I’m currently a research data scientist in MDI² at Boston Children’s Hospital working under the direction of Ata Kiapour and Nazgol Tavabi. Most recently, I worked on benchmarking open source LLM’s for targeted information retrieval from clinical notes. Prior to joining MDI², I finished a BS/MS at Clemson University where I studied knowledge-grounded systems for ICD coding under the direction of Amy Apon and Nina Hubig. During my undergrad, I had the opportunity to intern with Giant Oak (now Fidelity Investments), investigating the intersection of knowledge distillation and efficient attention architectures. Along the way, I’ve been fortunate to explore a range of problems that continue to shape how I think about language, data, and clinical decision support. Feel free to reach out if you’d like to talk research, ideas, or anything in between. Thanks for stopping by!