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The UAB Informatics Institute and Why It Isn’t Just a
Division of Computer Science
Dr. James Cimino
UAB Informatics Institute
11:15am, April 8, 2015 in CH405
Abstract
The field of biomedical informatics arose organically from many parallel efforts by computer
engineers assigned to biological or medical tasks and doctors who knew how to program
computers. What started as a collection of “let’s build something and see if it will work”
projects has evolved into an academic discipline that is part scientific method and part art,
based on collaborations between biologists, clinicians, computer scientists, engineers of all
sorts, cognitive scientists and even philosophers. Today, we have a spectrum of domains,
from bioinformatics, through translational research informatics, to clinical informatics. UAB
presents a microcosm of the field, with islands of informatics efforts in the Comprehensive
Cancer Center, the Department of Pathology, the Department of Medicine, the Genetics
Department, and Center for Clinical and Translational Science, and the School of Health
Professions, to name a few. The Dean of the UAB School of Medicine has recently established
three new programs to consolidate and coordinate this activity: the Center for Genomic
Medicine, the Personalized Medicine Institute, and the Informatics Institute, directed by Jim
Cimino. Dr. Cimino will provide an overview of the field of informatics, outline the goals of
each of the UAB initiatives and, with luck, show informatics will connect the dots.
Biography
Dr. James Cimino is a board certified internist who completed a National Library of Medicine
informatics fellowship at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University and then
went on to an academic position at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons
and the Presbyterian Hospital in New York. His principle research areas included desiderata
for controlled terminologies, mobile and Web-based clinical information systems for clinicians
and patients, and a context-aware form of clinical decision support called “infobuttons”.
In 2008, he moved to the National Institutes of Health, where he is the Chief of the Laboratory for Informatics Development and a Tenured Investigator at the NIH Clinical Center
and the National Library of Medicine. His principle project involves the development of
the Biomedical Translational Research Information System (BTRIS). He conducts clinical
research informatics research, directs the NLM’s postdoctoral training program in clinical
informatics, serves as an internal medicine consultant in the Clinical Center, and teaches at
Columbia University and Georgetown University as an Adjunct Professor. He is co-editor
(with Edward Shortliffe) of a leading textbook on Biomedical Informatics and is an Associate
Editor of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics. In 2015, he moved to the University of
Alabama in Birmingham as the inaugural director of the Informatics Institute.