Department News
CEI Symposium Highlights Health Equity
Members of the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science (DBIDS) were on hand as participants of the Community Engagement Initiative (CEI) Symposium, held on October 31st at the Hilton Birmingham Downtown at UAB.
Hackathon 2023 Addresses Patient Safety Through Use of Artificial Intelligence
The 5th Annual Data Sciences Hackathon was held virtually over the course of two days on September 9th and 10th, hosted by the UAB Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science (DBIDS) in conjunction with the Center for Clinical and Translational Sciences (CCTS). External sponsors for the event included the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative and the Jewish Healthcare Foundation.
Informatics Award Highlights Research in Cancer Algorithms
John Osborne, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science, recently received a notice of award for a U24 supplement to develop a cancer algorithm predicting the severity of cancer recurrence in patients. The work will build on previously funded work to identify recurrence retrospectively in UAB cancer patients using structured EHR data and clinical text.
Informatics Hosts Session at GLBIO Conference
Jake Chen, Ph.D., Chief Bioinformatics Officer of the UAB Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science, served as the session chair of Representational Learning in Genome Biology and Precision Medicine during the Great Lakes Bioinformatics (GLBIO) Conference in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Adjunct Faculty Member Receives Award
Sooryanarayana Varambally, Ph.D., MBA, professor in the Department of Pathology's Division of Molecular and Cellular Pathology and adjunct faculty at the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science, was one of 16 faculty members who were named the winners of the 2023 Dean's Excellence Awards for Faculty.
Bioinformatics Student Excels at UAB Spring 2023 Expo
The University of Alabama at Birmingham hosted the Service Learning and Undergraduate Research Expo from April 17th through April 21st. Maryam Choucha, a Bioinformatics student, received first place at the 2023 Spring Expo in the Physical and Applied Sciences category, for her online poster presentation entitled "Curating Genes and Network Models for Glioblastoma Drug Discovery."
Informatics Symposium Spotlights Trends in Medicine, Healthcare
The Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science, along with the Center for Clinical and Translational Sciences (CCTS), hosted the 7th Annual Translational and Transformative Informatics Symposium on April 21st, with the theme of “Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Medicine and Healthcare”.
Bioinformatics Student Receives Blazer Fellowship
The UAB Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) graduate program has been the recipient of seven Blazer Fellowships in 2022, and a Bioinformatics student recently etched his name as a part of this notable accomplishment.
Annual Hackathon Focuses on New Tool Development
![Hackin Omics](/medicine/informatics/images/hackathon_logo.png)
The 4th Annual Data Sciences Hackathon was hosted by the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science (DBIDS), Informatics Club, the UAB Biomedical Research Information Technology Enhancement Commons Program (U-BRITE), and the Center for Computational Genomics and Data Science (CGDS) over two days on August 5th-6th, providing attendees the opportunity to network with peers in the scientific community.
Read moreWhole-Genome Assembly Improved in Long-Read Sequencing
the first complete, gapless sequence of a human genome. It will now replace the reference genome first
drafted in 2000 under the original Human Genome Project.
Read more
Informatics Receives Set-Aside Funds
![John Osborne](/medicine/informatics/images/John_Osborne.jpg)
The Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science (DBIDS) has received set-aside funds to collaborate with Boston Children’s Hospital of Harvard Medical School through Aug 2023 for cancer research, as part of the U24 Project “Cancer Deep Phenotype Extraction from Electronic Medical Records.”
With these funds, John Osborne, PhD, Assistant Professor at DBIDS and the O’Neal Cancer Control and Population Science Program, will oversee the installation of a Deep Cancer Phenotyping (DeepPhe) system, in collaboration with Dr. Gaurav Goyal, MD, Assistant Professor and oncologist at the O’Neal Cancer Center.
Read moreDBIDS Chair Speaks on State of Biomedical Informatics and Systemic Racism
James Cimino, MD, Distinguished Professor of Medicine and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science, provided a special presentation on biomedical informatics and systemic racism.
The presentation, entitled "Is Biomedical Informatics Abetting Systemic Racism?," examines how discriminatory behavior can creep into methods such as clinical guidelines, machine learning and automated clinical decision support, and provides a case study of clinical alerts in the UAB Hospital electronic medical record system.
Call for COVID-19 Biomedical Data Science Partnership
Dear Colleagues,
As the Associate Director of the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science (DBIDS) and the program director of the U-BRITE Platform, I am announcing a special call for COVID-19 biomedical data science partnership with DBIDS, which will provide new biomedical informatics resources in our joint fight against COVID-19.
Read moreInformatics for Precision Medicine the Topic of Recent Informatics Conference at UAB
The original application of informatics in medicine was developing electronic health records and expert systems and enabling the use of data from across multiple systems to assist with research, clinical decision making and patient care.
“The field of informatics has evolved immensely from its original use,” said Jake Chen, Ph.D., Chief Bioinformatics Officer at the UAB Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science (DBIDS). “The next step in the evolution of informatics is the collaboration with precision medicine to solve complex clinical and treatment issues facing patients today. This collaboration is about using genomic information and data-driven informatics to build new analytic engines, or the ‘brain,’ of future healthcare,” Chen explained.