To the BIDS community,
This is the first newsletter from the ‘Department’ of Biomedical Informatics & Data Science at Yale School of Medicine. This is a landmark not only for BIDS and Yale, but for our field in general. The first department of medical informatics in the USA was created in the 1960s (University of Utah in 1964), with a few launched in the following decades. With the transition of the section into a department, our specialty receives the needed recognition at Yale as we move ahead with many new initiatives, and celebrate Yale for bringing its world leading medical expertise and informatics into a center for innovation.
The process of developing a department is not always straightforward. While 16 months may look fast, we stood on the shoulders of those who have been practicing informatics at Yale for a long time: clinical informatics experts and many computational biologists were working in clinical and bioinformatics for many decades. We have recruited several new faculty to fill strategic gaps and we are starting a new phase where the boundaries of clinical and bioinformatics become fuzzier. We now have a department that can serve as a hub for physicians, informaticians and biomedical data scientists, a unit that make its own academic appointments and develop its own degree programs while connecting everyone together.
Please join me in congratulating everyone for this important milestone. Through this newsletter, take a moment to learn what we are doing at BIDS, and join us at the start of this incredible journey!
– Lucila Ohno-Machado, MD, MBA, PhD
Waldemar von Zedtwitz Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Informatics and Data Science
Deputy Dean for Biomedical Informatics
Chair, Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science
BIDS Summer Newsletter 2024
Edited by Akio Tamura-Ho and Shane Zhang
Featured
This summer, four students will travel 7,000 miles from Rwanda to Yale School of Medicine as part of a new international exchange program organized by the department of biomedical informatics and data science.
Hot off the Press: Natural Language Processing in Biomedicine
A new textbook on natural language processing, co-edited by Hua Xu, PhD, FACMI, assistant dean for biomedical informatics, offers students and researchers essential reading for biomedical machine learning techniques.
Blockchain Trainee Headed to Med School
After spending a year at the department of biomedical informatics and data science (BIDS), Roger Lacson is headed to medical school. He’ll do so with an unconventional background in computer science and software engineering—and a prestigious journal publication under his belt.
Welcome New Faculty, Fellows, Students and Staff (Summer 2024)
We are pleased to welcome new faculty, postdocs, staff, and students to our growing department.
Rodríguez Martínez Brings AI and Cancer Therapy Research to Yale
María Rodríguez Martínez, PhD, has been recruited as Associate Professor in Yale School of Medicine's new department of biomedical informatics and data science.
Cho's Lab Presents Privacy-Preserving Genomics at RECOMB
In this summer newsletter feature for the department of biomedical informatics and data science, we spotlight recent research from Hoon Cho, PhD, and his lab.
MarketScan Data Now Available for Yale Researchers
The Yale Biomedical Informatics and Computing Office (YBIC) is excited to announce that members of the Yale community can now access the Merative™ MarketScan® Research Databases.
Recognition
Taylor and Scottish Partners Receive £1 Million for Palliative Care Research
Andrew Taylor, MD, MHS joins collaborators at the University of St Andrews and other Scottish institutions to conduct research to improve unscheduled care for people in the last year of life.
Yale New Haven Health and Yale University celebrate Innovation Awards
BIDS faculty led two out of the five winning teams at the second YNHHS Innovation Awards Ceremony, winning $100,000 each. Mark Iscoe, MD, MHS, Andrew Taylor, MD, MHS, and Melissa Davis MD, MBA, led one winning project, while Rohan Khera, MD, MS and Evangelos Oikonomou, MD, DPhil led another.
Leeds Receives VA Research Award for AI, Housing Study
Ira Leeds, MD, FACS, FASCRS, recently received an Association of VA Surgeons (AVAS) Faculty Research Award to study the relationship between housing instability and surgical outcomes using AI methods.
Cheung Receives NIH Grant to Research Water Contaminants and Human Health
Kei-Hoi Cheung, PhD, has been awarded a grant by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) to research environmental health data and drinking water contamination using AI methods.
Meeker Elected to Cosmos Governing Council
Daniella Meeker, PhD, is one of three researchers newly elected to the governing council of Cosmos, Epic's platform for electronic health records.
New Department of Biomedical Informatics & Data Science Established at Yale
Attaining department status will enable Biomedical Informatics & Data Science to build on the momentum it already has achieved, increasing its national profile and positioning YSM to lead AI in medicine.
Yale-EPFL AI Model for Medicine Featured in 2024 AI Index Report
Meditron, the medical LLM developed by Annie Hartley, MD, PhD, MPH, and her LiGHT lab, was featured in the 2024 AI Index Report.
Yale Research Team Awarded $4 Million Grant to Evaluate New Immunizations for Infant RSV
A multidisciplinary team led by principal investigator Carlos Oliveira, MD, has received a $4 million federal grant to study the effectiveness of a new vaccine and monoclonal antibody shot designed to prevent respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) in infants.
News Clips
- Yale is the lead institution in the ‘All of Us’ Research Consortium, receiving a large grant from NIH.
- Rohan Khera, MD, MS, and his CarDS lab, presented groundbreaking clinical research at the 2024 American College of Cardiology Scientific Sessions.
- Hua Xu, PhD, FACMI, launches the Yale University LLM and NLP Interest Group. They meet every second Wednesday.
- Deborah Levy, MD, MPH, is first author of a new VA cohort study on gabapentin.
- Terika McCall, PhD, MPH, MBA, appeared as a guest on the For Your Informatics podcast, discussing breakthroughs and insights at the intersection of digital health and mental health.
- Ethel Nalule's photography is on display in Sterling Hall of Medicine.
- Lee Schwamm, MD, was an expert witness to the House Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Health, discussing the role and future of telehealth.
- Jeffrey Cohen, MD, co-authored a study finding a significant association between eczema (atopic dermatitis) and eating disorders. The researchers analyzed data from more than 250,000 electronic medical records of patients participating in the All of Us Research Program.
- Mark Gerstein, PhD, features in Yale News, for a new study of nearly 400 human brains that could help enable precision-medicine for neuropsychiatric disease.
- Yuan Lu, ScD, Yuntian Liu, MPH, Wade Schulz, MD, and others use real-world data to identify the most effective hypertension drugs for patients
- On Connecticut Public Radio, Melissa Davis, MD, MBA, discusses her research finding racial bias in ChatGPT’s radiology reports
- A team of BIDS faculty and students, including Andrew Taylor, MD, MHS, David Chartash, PhD, Qingyu Chen, PhD, Vimig Socrates, MS, Thomas Huang, Xuguang Ai, MS, and Soraya Fereydooni, earned 2nd place out 89 participants in the BioNLP ACL'24 Shared Task on Streamlining Discharge Documentation.
- Hang Zhou, PhD, and others use VA health data to complete the first well-powered, genome-wide association study of epiretinal membrane, a common retinal disorder.