Stephanie Guerlain, associate professor of systems and information engineering
This November, the U.Va. Engineering School's Department of Systems and Information Engineering (SIE) became the newest of only 18 National Library of Medicine (NLM) informatics training sites in the country.
The department was awarded this distinction, along with a five-year grant, based on a proposal for a training program that would provide a collaborative environment comprised of investigators from the SIE Department, the School of Nursing, the School of Medicine and the University hospital. The program's goal is to create future research leaders who will apply systems engineering techniques to approach medical informatics and health care challenges. Funding for the renewable program begins in June 2007.
"The grant reviewers specifically cited U.Va. as one of the only places in the country that could even propose such a research and training model," said Stephanie Guerlain, associate professor in the SIE Department, who will lead the engineering portion of the program. "They were particularly impressed with the proposed collaborations with medical faculty and staff who are in full support of the idea of using systems engineering methods to address health care process challenges."
The NLM, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, has awarded 18 five-year grants, totaling more than $75 million for research training in biomedical informatics, the discipline that seeks to apply computer and communications technology to the field of health. By funding these programs, NLM supports nearly 300 pre- and postdoctoral trainees each year. For more than 30 years, NLM has been the principal supporter of biomedical informatics research training in the U.S.
"Health care issues continue to present a variety of challenges to our society," said James H. Aylor, dean of the Engineering School. "This program will comprehensively prepare trainees in a unique collaborative environment to confront these challenges."
Specific research areas that trainees may choose to pursue include training and decision support systems, clinical laboratory automation, and analysis and design of handoffs of care, among others. The pre-doctoral program is designed as a five-year Ph.D. beyond the Bachelor of Science or a three-year Ph.D. beyond the Master of Science. The postdoctoral program for those holding a doctoral degree who would like to pursue a postdoctoral fellowship in medical informatics is designed as a two-year M.S. in systems and information engineering.
Guerlain attributes the receipt of the award to its focus on interdisciplinary and collaborative initiatives beginning with the proposal's development. "The proposal was truly a collaborative effort among the Department of Systems and Information Engineering (particularly assistant professors Ellen Bass and Gregory Gerling); the Department of Public Health Sciences in the U.Va. Medical School (led by Dr. James Harrison); and all of the collaborators in the Medical School, Nursing School and University hospital," she said.
Currently, there are 18 NLM informatics training program sites distributed geographically throughout the U.S. The programs offer graduate degrees or intense research experiences in health care/clinical informatics, bioinformatics, computational biology, translational informatics, public health informatics, and imaging and signal processing. Program site locations include: the University of California, Irvine; the University of California, Los Angeles;, Stanford University; the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center; Yale University; Indiana University; Harvard University; Johns Hopkins University; the University of Missouri, Columbia; Columbia University Health Sciences; the Oregon Health & Science University; the University of Pittsburgh; Vanderbilt University; Rice University; the University of Utah; the University of Virginia; the University of Washington; and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
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