LYNDA R HARDY
$325,816
Hadi Kharrazi
Johns Hopkins University
Maryland
National Library of Medicine (NLM)
PROJECT SUMMARY Johns Hopkins University has recently re-established a multi-disciplinary, multi-school education program in Biomedical Informatics and Data Science (BIDS). The program is centrally coordinated and managed by the newly established Section of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science (BIDS) in the Division of General Internal Medicine. Faculty are drawn from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Whiting School of Engineering, the School of Nursing, and the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. The program is structured around four tracks: Translational Bioinformatics, Clinical Research Informatics, Healthcare/Clinical Informatics, and Public Health Informatics. The program is built on the decades of informatics training tradition fostered by the Welch Medical Library and the Division of Health Sciences Informatics, now consolidated in the new BIDS Section. The new organization has established tight integration with the University and School of Medicine Education leadership, support systems, and infrastructure. We have revamped and extended our core curriculum to balance traditional informatics topics with current data science principles and methods. Specialized curricula have been developed in depth for each academic track of the program. Because of our newly formalized administrative structure, students are now free to take elective courses anywhere in the University with tuition reciprocity. Students also have access to the deep bench of research programs across informatics, computer science, biomedical engineering, and data science throughout the university, anchored by an ever-growing portfolio of BIDS grants and cooperative agreements in the BIDS Section such as the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C). Thus, BIDS students have unprecedented opportunities for applied practica at depth to enrich and reinforce their education, provide a basis for theses, and more importantly achieve experience as collaborators, contributors, and authors. The University and School of Medicine provide state-of-the-art clinical and basic science data-analytics environments, including our Secure Analytic Framework Environment (SAFE) virtual machines, the Precision Medicine Analytics Platform (PMAP), the state HIE population-based EHR analyses platform (on PMAP), and well-curated clinical data warehouses in OMOP, PCORNet, ACT, and TriNetX formats. Training in biomedical ethics and the responsible conduct of research is deeply embedded in all practica involving patient data. Students have opportunity to work with well-established, well-funded research mentors, and to receive instruction from faculty with a deep commitment to education and training. The strengthening of translational science, multidisciplinary teams, and enterprise-class infrastructure and computer support across Johns Hopkins University provides students with opportunities to witness and participate in the new shape of collaborative science into the future.