Research Project
10250310
PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT We seek renewal of our NLM Training Program in Biomedical Informatics and Data Science (NLMTP), which for 24 years has consistently produced outstanding trainees as the program has evolved along with Biomedical Informatics (BMI) itself, successfully bringing computation, mathematics, statistics, modeling, data- driven inference and decision-making and advances in cognitive informatics to bear on biomedical problems. With this renewal we will further expand our program to explore and exploit the synergies between BMI and Data Science (DS). Our training program will equip trainees with not only the current DS methodology, computational approaches, and statistical methods to solve BMI problems, but also solid and broad BMI foundations, enabling them to develop novel methodologies for attacking problems currently beyond our reach. Recent advances in BMI also bring to the forefront important issues that will be emphasized in our NLMTP including the need for effective communication of biomedical information to interdisciplinary audiences of clinicians, researchers and patients. We are well prepared to train graduate students and postdocs to meet BMI challenges. Our 40 training faculty are an integral part of the Texas Medical Center and have exemplary training and research records. They have trained 194 predocs and 206 postdocs over the past 10 years, and continue to be active, with 167 predocs and 93 postdocs currently in their labs. To date our faculty have disseminated their research in more than 812 publications with their predocs, and 1,736 with their postdocs. Our predoctoral trainees will have completed one year of study and have joined a lab at one of six NLMTP participating institutions before joining the NLMTP. Our postdoctoral trainees will be selected through national recruiting and from the labs of our training faculty at those institutions. NLMTP training will combine core courses and elective courses, training in the reproducibility of research, professional/career development activities, monthly meetings with experts, and interdisciplinary co-mentored research projects to engage our 9 pre- and 6 postdoctoral trainees with a range of opportunities in health care/clinical informatics, translational bioinformatics, and clinical research informatics to prepare them for a wide range of careers as the new generation of BMI professionals.
