Dr. Jane Odum, a Nigerian-born doctoral candidate at the University of Georgia's Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, has been awarded first place and $30,000 in the Google-sponsored MedGemma Impact Challenge for her innovative mobile-first artificial intelligence platform, EpiCast. The competition, which encourages developers to create human-centered AI applications for complex healthcare problems, saw over 850 teams participate.

EpiCast is designed to improve disease surveillance in low-resource settings by connecting informal clinical observations with formal surveillance systems, thereby enabling earlier outbreak detection and a faster public health response. Odum's inspiration for EpiCast stems from her experiences during the 2014 Ebola outbreak and the COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria, where she witnessed firsthand the critical role of community health workers in ground-level data collection and the fear associated with rapid disease spread.

A key feature of EpiCast is its ability to function offline on mobile devices, a significant advantage in areas with unreliable internet connectivity. Odum optimized advanced medical language models to run locally, reducing processing time from minutes to seconds. This was informed by her doctoral research under Dr. John Miller, focusing on diffusion-based generative models for epidemiological forecasting.

"Jane possesses a rare ability to blend deep technical expertise with practical problem-solving," said John Miller, a professor in the School of Computing at the University of Georgia. "Her work on EpiCast demonstrates strong initiative in creating applications with real-world impact."

This prestigious award highlights Odum's significant contribution to the field of AI in healthcare and her commitment to developing practical solutions for global health challenges.