Message from J. Larry Jameson, MD, PhD, Jon Epstein, MD, and Jason Moore, PhD Update on IBI Activities
November 3, 2015
To:PSOM Faculty, Students and Staff
From:J. Larry Jameson, MD, PhD, EVP/Dean
Jon Epstein, MD, EVD/CSO
Jason Moore, PhD, IBI Director
Re: Update on IBI Activities
We write to alert you to new opportunities to engage with the Institute of Biomedical Informatics (IBI) and to update you on the latest developments in its exciting evolution.
Since the arrival of Jason Moore, PhD, eight months ago as the Institute’s inaugural Director, staffing has ramped up, the number of affiliated faculty has expanded, and programmatic development has accelerated.
IBI now has more than 40 affiliated faculty members committed to building an informatics ecosystem at Penn Medicine second to none. In addition to PSOM, IBI faculty members come from the Schools of Arts and Sciences, Engineering, Nursing, Veterinary Medicine, and the Wharton School.
A fully staffed administrative team -- including Associate Director John Holmes, PhD, Managing Director Marc Rigas, PhD, Program Director Hannah Chervitz, BS, and Project Director Paul Kopec, MS – is now housed on the second floor of the Richards building. The recently renovated space is being equipped to include a state-of-the-art visualization facility – the IBI Idea Factory. The new lab will facilitate collaboration and idea generation through interactive display of data and research results. A team is in place to develop new visualization tools and to build artificial intelligence capability to facilitate interactive analysis and informatics-driven discovery. First phase construction of the new facility will be completed this spring.
At the same time, the IBI Bioinformatics Core has grown this year from one FTE to four FTEs and is actively supporting research with big data in the Abramson Cancer Center (ACC), the Center of Excellence in Environmental Toxicology (CEET), the Penn Epigenetics Program, and CHOP, as well as individual faculty investigators throughout PSOM. Contact Dr. Paul Wang (zhipwang@upenn.edu) for more information about services.
IBI provides competitive fellowships for undergraduates seeking research experiences, as well as for graduate students and postdoctoral students engaging in collaborative projects between IBI informaticians and clinical, experimental, and observational investigators in the biomedical sciences. IBI also supports postdoctoral teaching fellowships in informatics. To explore collaborative opportunities, we encourage you to contact IBI faculty.
Looking ahead, IBI is actively recruiting talented informatics faculty. A search committee has screened more than 85 candidates. Several are engaged in the interview process, with expertise including clinical informatics, computational biology, and precision medicine. IBI is also recruiting Penn Medicine's first Chief Research Information Officer (CRIO). The CRIO will build a team that will develop and strengthen connections between faculty and the Penn Medicine Information Services teams around the use of clinical data for biomedical research.
We are proud to say that nowhere else in the country is so much capacity-building activity in biomedical informatics underway. Our goal of placing Penn at the very forefront in this domains is now within reach. For additional information about IBI, please visit http://upibi.org or contact Jason Moore jhmoore@upenn.edu.