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Apply for seed funding for CRI services!

By News

The Department of Pediatrics has released a Request for Applications for a new initiative to foster excellence in research scholarship. This initiative will provide seed funding for promising clinical and health outcomes research projects focused on the health of children and their families. In particular, the Department aims to promote the early career development of translational and clinical faculty researchers, with the goal of generating preliminary data for subsequent funding applications.

This seed funding will be available to support services from the Center for Research Informatics, such as data requests from the Clinical Research Data Warehouse, data analysis by the Bioinformatics Core, or application development.

The awards: four awards of up to $5000 each
Who is eligible: faculty, fellows, and residents with faculty mentors
How to apply: find the Request for Applications here and apply by October 15

CRI to play role in new pediatric data resource center

By News

As part of a newly announced five-year, $14.8 million NIH grant, the CRI will play a key role in building the Gabriella Miller Kids First pediatric data resource center. The center, a multi-institutional project headquartered at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, will provide pediatric researchers with a much-needed way to work with large sets of genomic and clinical data related to childhood cancer in order to better predict and treat it.

Two UChicago data science groups, the CRI and the Center for Data Intensive Science (CDIS), will take part in the project under the leadership of CDIS Director Robert Grossman, PhD, and CRI Director Sam Volchenboum, MD, PhD. A team combining both groups’ expertise in building data commons will be responsible for designing and operating the technical foundations of the project: the software that will be used to process and share data within the center, including the integration of disparate data sources, coordination with third-party applications, and support for data analysis.

By leveraging our years of experience working with multi-institutional data networks and large biomedical datasets, through this project the CRI has the opportunity to make a major contribution toward ending childhood cancer. Read more about the Kids First center and UChicago’s role here.

 

UCM/Google partnership in the news

By News

The research collaboration between Google and University of Chicago Medicine was profiled this week in Becker’s Hospital Review, which called our partnership “a data-driven duo to watch.”

The article highlights how UCM will take advantage of the CRI’s Clinical Research Data Warehouse as a base for Google’s predictive models. CRI Director Sam Volchenboum explains why the CRDW is a particularly important resource for the Google project: “We’ve taken a very rigorous approach to our data warehouse that is not necessarily the norm. We’ve been able to take our clinical data and standardize it and clean it up in a way that makes it much more easy to analyze and to perform this type of machine learning.”

“Our digital trail leaves many clues, both subtle and overt, to our overall health and well-being.”

By News

In Wired, CRI Director Sam Volchenboum shares a thought-provoking essay on the potential of social networks like Facebook and Google to predict disease. As our daily lives generate more and more trackable data through social media, wearables, GPS, etc., algorithms could become better and better at recognizing patterns that could point to health conditions — but the potential benefits of this are balanced with significant risks. Read Sam’s take on it here.

UCM and CRI partner with Google to explore machine learning in healthcare

By News

Google has announced announced a new partnership with University of Chicago Medicine which will take advantage of the CRI’s experience and expertise in working with biomedical data and predictive algorithms.

The Google team will work with University researchers to apply advanced machine learning techniques to de-identified patient data. These models may detect patterns that enable doctors to predict future health events — meaning they could anticipate patients’ needs before they arise, improve outcomes, and save lives. The partnership will expand on work in this area that is already in progress at UCM, such as the eCART model for predicting cardiac arrest.

Read more about the partnership in the Chicago Tribune and on Google’s blog.

Cover of Medicine on the Midway magazine with headline "Data-driven medicine"

The CRI’s role in data-driven medicine

By News

The Spring 2017 issue of the University of Chicago’s Medicine on the Midway magazine focuses on data-driven medicine — the ways in which advanced tools for mining and analyzing data are being applied to health care in the pursuit of precision medicine as well as public health initiatives. A great deal of the CRI’s work is at this intersection of data, technology, and health, and CRI projects are featured extensively throughout the issue. Read the cover story to learn more about our work with the GAIN Consortium, SIMPL, the Clinical Research Data Warehouse, Thirty Million Words, the NCI Genomic Data Commons, and more.

REDCap achieves security accreditation

By News, REDCap

We are pleased to announce that the Center for Research Informatics’ REDCap system has achieved security accreditation by the BSD Risk Management Group. This means that REDCap meets the information security requirements defined in our cyber security policies and with the NIST Cyber Security Framework. Visit the BSD ISO website for additional information about the BSD Information Security Program at https://security.bsd.uchicago.edu. To learn about other systems currently undergoing the Security Assessment & Authorization process, please visit https://security.bsd.uchicago.edu/saa_review/. For further questions, please contact the BSD ISO team via e-mail at security@bsd.uchicago.edu.

CRI welcomes CTMS team leaders

By CTMS, News

We’re happy to announce that Alex Lapson and Don Starkey have joined the Center for Research Informatics to lead our newest major project, the management and development of a BSD-wide clinical trials management system.

Alex Lapson, Senior Program Manager, has more than twenty years of project and program management experience with a range of high-profile clients. In coordination with Don and our Manager of Programming Brian Furner, Alex is responsible for the daily direction of the CTMS project.

Don Starkey, Lead Web Applications Developer, is the technical lead for the project. Bringing more than twenty years of experience in programming, software architecture, and application development, he will design our software solution and guide a team of developers to bring this project to fruition.

Welcome, Alex and Don!