Sae Han, MPH | Northwestern University

About Me

I am a PhD candidate in Health and Biomedical Informatics at Northwestern University. My research examines whether local LLMs (especially small LLMs) can reliably support unstructured qualitative data analysis in community-engaged research settings, especially as a human-in-the-loop system. My evaluations combine technical benchmarking with direct input from the researchers and community partners who use the outputs.

Much of what shaped this work came from my years at the National Institutes of Health, where I worked on clinical research data systems, recruitment research, and informatics initiatives at the National Institute on Aging and the National Cancer Institute. Watching research teams struggle to make sense of large volumes of unstructured data (and seeing how often valuable patient and community insights went underanalyzed simply due to capacity constraints) is what pushed me toward building practical, privacy-preserving, robust, and reproducible AI tools that make advanced data methods accessible to the researchers and practitioners who need them most. Alongside my doctoral and NIH work, I have collaborated with academic groups, federal contrators, and public health departments on LLM-assisted research tools, ontology development, and clinical data standardization.

I hold an MPH and Certificate in Health Promotion Research and Practice from Columbia University and a BS in Human Biology, Health, and Society from Cornell University. My published work spans Alzheimer’s disease clinical trials, health equity, and public health surveillance.

Outside of research, I like to work with my hands – you can usually find me crocheting, embroidering, doing pottery, or baking!