A Welcome Message by Constantin F. Aliferis, M.D., Ph.D., Director of CHIBI
CHIBI represents the implementation of a bold and pioneering institutional vision under the leadership of Dean Robert I. Grossman and Vice Dean Vivian S. Lee to create a world class Academic Informatics Center in a major Clinical and Research setting (NYULMC) and to fully integrate the center activities with research, education and patient care, in an unprecedentedly short time frame.
Currently, biology and medicine are undergoing a complete transformation making this truly a magnificent moment in time to conduct basic, translational, and clinical research. Advanced computation is a critical and indispensable ingredient of this revolution. Consequently, our goals at CHIBI are both ambitious and far-reaching:
The mission of CHIBI is to catalyze transformative changes in biomedicine through breakthrough computational methodological research, best practices services, state of the art infrastructure, and cutting-edge education.
CHIBI faculty and staff are tirelessly working to transform medicine and advance science.
CHIBI faculty:
- Have invented best of class software, algorithms, theory and analysis protocols for diagnostic, predictive and prognostic analyses of high throughput data such as next generation diagnostics and personalized medicine.
- Have made major breakthroughs in the development of software, algorithms and theory in the interpretation of very high dimensional data thereby unraveling mechanisms of disease and modeling complex biological systems.
- Have pioneered innovative and uniquely powerful ways to search both the literature and the web for high quality medical information.
- Are pushing the envelope in innovative tools for medical education.
- Are working hand-in-hand with world-renowned scientists to support a multitude of projects that cover the spectrum from basic to translational to clinical research in practically every type of disease.
- Constitute a critical element of the infrastructure needed to operate exciting new technologies including high-throughput sequencing, as well as novel proteomic and genomic assay platforms.
- Are a critical component of supporting essential medical and clinical data management infrastructure including EMR, Warehouse, Biospecimen management and Clinical Trial databases.
- Provide support for hundreds of grants, grant proposals, and project life-cycles from research design and preliminary results through publication.
- Publish their findings in prominent journals and share their discoveries, methods and systems, with colleagues all over the world.
The CHIBI philosophy:
a) Align CHIBI activities, infrastructure, and people with the needs and activities of basic science/ translational/ clinical research, education and patient care across the enterprise.
b) Employ a strictly evidence-based approach to informatics services.
c) Employ a theoretically and empirically rigorous approach to new methods development.
d) Pursue excellence in new methods development and deployment in strategically chosen areas.
Especially with regards to our areas of development focus, we strive to be a leader in a carefully considered set of areas that we feel can maximize the potential for novel discoveries and improved care for many years to come:
Area 1. Informatics and computational analytics for molecular signatures and personalized medicine.
Area 2. Computational causal discovery methods in biomedicine.
Area 3. Next generation sequencing informatics.
Area 4. Cutting-edge educational informatics methods and systems.
Area 5. Next generation biomedical information retrieval and scientometrics
Area 6. Innovative research design and analysis services based on rigorous literature synthesis and empirical benchmarking.
Area 7. Assay-specific informatics for a variety of genomic and proteomic platforms.
Area 8. Advanced services and systems for multi-modal data storage and management.
Area 9. Advanced enterprise-wide data mining methods, software and services.
We hope that you will find in our site useful information about how CHIBI can be of help to your efforts.
Since CHIBI as well as this site are work in progress, we greatly value your feedback and advice on how to improve out center and on how to best accomplish our mission.
With best wishes,
Constantin F. Aliferis, M.D., Ph.D.
Director of the Center for Health Informatics and Bioinformatics at New York University
November 2009
