The Breast Cancer Research Foundation of Alabama has approved funding for a research grant effort led by Jin Chen, Ph.D., and John Osborne, Ph.D.

The University of Alabama (UA) System Board of Trustees unanimously approved plans for the UAB Health System to transition to a new electronic health record (EHR) platform, EPIC, for electronic health records, revenue cycle, and clinical research functions.

James Cimino, M.D., chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science, attended the National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) Board of Regents meeting. National Institutes of Health (NIH) Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak, DDS, Ph.D., presented NIH Director Monica Bertagnolli’s vision for the future of NIH. The vision focused on expanding biomedical research data use to inform new research and improve health outcomes, and connecting research to primary care to optimize patient outcomes.

Jake Chen, Ph.D., director of the Systems AI Pharmacology Research Center (SPARC), played a key role in organizing the HealthDay event at Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) 2024 in Barcelona, Spain.

Senior bioinformatics student Melissa Mercer recently participated in the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Summer Research Academy, an undergraduate program offering summer scholarships for STEM students.

Congratulations to professor Tiago Colicchio, Ph.D., MBA, who recently welcomed a new postdoctoral fellow, Jakir Masud, Ph.D.

Congratulations to Jin Chen, Ph.D., who will serve as the vice chair of Education for the UAB Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science. Chen will manage the educational programs for the department while coordinating recruitment and admissions with the rest of the department faculty.

John D. Osborne, Ph.D., assistant professor of the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science, had multiple papers accepted as poster presentations for the upcoming November AMIA Symposium in San Francisco.

Distinguished professor of Medicine and chair of the UAB Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science, James Cimino, MD, will be the closing keynote speaker at the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) 2024 Annual Symposium, taking place on November 9-13 in San Francisco, California.

Director of Clinical Research Informatics Matthew Wyatt and his Research Data Group team are now able to obtain previously unavailable variables in electronic health records through the use of text analytics. The technology and tools that allow this capability are only used within the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science and have been used in various research efforts.

Professor of Microbiology Alexander Rosenberg, Ph.D., will be part of a research team studying T and B tissue-resident memory cells, known as TRM and BRM cells, as part of a five-year, $18.5 million U19 grant awarded to the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

James Cimino, M.D., treasurer of the American Medical Informatics Association’s (AMIA) Board of Directors, attended their most recent meeting along with the first day of AMIA’s Clinical Informatics Conference held in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

James Cimino, M.D., distinguished professor of Medicine and chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science, recently attended the annual meeting of the Clinical Decision Support Innovation Collaborative (CDSiC) on May 14, 2024.

Assistant professor of medicine John D. Osborne, Ph.D., will contribute to the R21 grant “Comprehensive Assessment of Delirium Risk due to Medications.” 

John D. Osborne, Ph.D., assistant professor of the Department of Medicine, provided a presentation as part of the Clinical and Translational Science Training Program (CTSTP). 

Members of the Bridge2Ai Consortium attended the inaugural NIH Bridge2AI All-Hands Meeting in Bethesda, Maryland. 

The 8^th Annual Translational and Transformative Informatics Symposium (ATTIS) was held at the Margaret Cameron Spain Auditorium on May 3. This year’s symposium, theme was “Drug Discovery in AI,” focusing on the relationship between cutting-edge drug discovery and groundbreaking advances in artificial intelligence.

Members of the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s (UAB) Systems Pharmacology AI Research Center (SPARC) provided presentations and talks at the 20^th edition of the MidSouth Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Society (MCBIOS), one of the largest bioinformatics conferences in the country.

The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) has been awarded a U54 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and their initiative, the Common Fund Data Ecosystem (CFDE). The grant, $9.5 million over five years, will be in collaboration with the University of Colorado (CU) and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The U54 grant aims to modernize data sharing, integration, and innovation across the biomedical research community while enhancing the interoperability and accessibility of NIH-funded data repositories.

Lurong Pan, Ph.D., found of Ainnonence, Inc., a drug discovery firm that looked to accelerate drug discovery efforts through comprehensive models, has joined the Systems Pharmacology AI Research Center (SPARC) here at UAB.