Penn Medicine's New Institute for Biomedical Informatics |
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March 26, 2013,
Volume 59, No. 26 |
The Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania announces the creation of the Institute for Biomedical Informatics (IBI). With support from the naming gift of the Smilow Center for Translational Research, the IBI will "bring together the large number of Penn faculty who work in the broad field of biomedical informatics to inform science and medical care. We will expand the number of faculty even more to create a wide-ranging program of research and education to find and clinically apply the treatments of the future and to train the next generation of physician-scientists," said Dr. J. Larry Jameson, executive vice president for the Health System and dean of the Perelman School of Medicine.
Dr. John Hogenesch, professor of pharmacology, has been named interim director of the IBI. Given the breadth of this field, three associate directors have also been named: Dr. John Holmes, associate professor of medical informatics in epidemiology; Dr. Klaus Kaestner, professor of genetics; and Dr. Curtis Langlotz, professor of radiology. A national search will be launched this spring for the institute's permanent director.
Big data is increasingly driving both biological research and clinical care. In biomedicine, this information runs the gamut from bioinformatics at the genome and molecular level, to health-care informatics at the clinical level, to public-health informatics at the population level.
The IBI, in partnership with the Schools of Engineering & Applied Science, Arts & Sciences, Nursing, and Veterinary Medicine, as well as The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, will tackle challenges directly relevant to patient care, as well as improve basic research that leads to more personalized care.
The Institute will also focus on educating the next generation of biomedical informaticians by folding in a new Masters in Biomedical Informatics degree program with the existing PhD program in Genomics and Computational Biology and by creating additional graduate and medical training programs as this field evolves.
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