Stanford University
300 Pasteur Drive, Stanford, CA 94304
USA
Presenter: Michael Becich, PhD
Associate Vice-Chancellor for Informatics in the Health Sciences
University of PIttsburgh
About the Event:
Biomedical Informatics and Data Science are getting significant attention across the NIH institutes and centers. This is being driven by the requirement of informatics innovation in team science grants and the need for data sharing at a national level. The Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) at Pitt is at the forefront of these efforts supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS), the Patients Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) and the Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) data science initiative. Precision Medicine will require informatics Innovation as well and we are aiming to link the four important national initiatives with common data sharing and clinical phenotyping tools. This presentation will profile the efforts as well as UPMC’s new Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance which aims to commercialize informatics innovation to improve health for Western Pennsylvania.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Becich received his bachelor’s, MD, and PhD degrees from Northwestern University, and undertook residency and fellowship training in anatomic pathology at Washington University in St. Louis. He advanced through the academic ranks at the University of Pittsburgh, and is now Professor and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics, Director of Oncology and Pathology Informatics, and also Professor of Information Sciences and Telecommunications. In this capacity, he has had an important role in the National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (CaBIG) and particularly the CaTissue application for research tissue banking.
In addition to his scholarly contributions, Mike Becich is best known for creating the Advancing Practice, Instruction, and Innovation (APIII) conference and the Association for Pathology Informatics (API). His nomination to the College notes that “Frustrated with the slow pace of adoption of informatics ideas in mainstream pathology, Mike took the bull by the horns and established these wildly successful subspecialty activities” and that “he is a deep thinker about the future of collaborative informatics and its role in personalized medicine.” Dr. Becich’s election to the College recognizes these diverse and sustained contributions to the field.