Biomedical Informatics and Data Science Research Training Program (BIRT)

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PROJECT SUMMARY The National Library of Medicine first funded the Biomedical Informatics and Data Science Research Training (BIRT) program at Harvard Medical School (HMS) in 1992. The program continues to be a driving force in the education of future leaders in the field of computationally-enabled biomedicine. As data-driven research increasingly enables critical innovation across the whole spectrum of healthcare, we need to train individuals from a wide range of disciplines to participate in this process. Through rigorous scientific training, the proposed program will prepare these individuals to integrate, interpret, and act on large-scale, high-throughput, and complex data resulting from biomedical research and the practice of medicine. The Department of Biomedical Informatics at HMS will be the administrative and intellectual home for the proposed program. Faculty in the department have expertise in artificial intelligence, biomedical discovery infrastructure including computational statistics and data visualization, clinical decision support, computational omics, evolutionary genetics, integration of genotypes, phenotypes and environmental exposures, learning health systems, microbial genomics, and taxonomies of disease. Additionally, other Harvard faculty, members of the Broad Institute, and faculty based at affiliated teaching hospitals such Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Dana-Farber Cancer Center will participate in the training of the fellows. Furthermore, the program will continue to coordinate its training efforts with other data science programs at Harvard and the Harvard Data Science Initiative. The proposed program will focus on areas of informatics with direct health-related application domains: translational bioinformatics, healthcare/clinical informatics, clinical research informatics, and public health informatics. Combining the broad expertise and deep knowledge of informatics in our research laboratories with the clinical data generated in the daily practice of medicine at the affiliated institutions will provide an exceptional training environment. The program will be open to trainees at the predoctoral and postdoctoral level who will enroll in academically rigorous degree-granting programs. Predoctoral fellows will enroll in a PhD program, and postdoctoral fellows will enroll in a Master’s program. Through these programs, the academic progress of the trainees will be assessed regularly. In addition, trainees will conduct full-time research with internationally recognized faculty on high-profile grants and research projects. We will also offer these research opportunities to short-term trainees.