Welcome Letter

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Dear UAB Colleagues:

As the Associate Director and the Chief Bioinformatics Officer of the UAB Informatics Institute and the program director of the U-BRITE Platform, I warmly welcome your participation in the new Cancer Bioinformatics and Data Science (CBIDS) initiative. This initiative aims to strengthen the collaborative development and application of cancer data science tools among UAB biomedical informaticians, IT professionals, cancer researchers, and oncologists.

Through CBIDS, the UAB Informatics Institute will provide in-kind services in collaborations with cancer center investigators, who are developing multi-year multi-PI cancer research programs, through existing or planned NIH grants. As part of this partnership, those supported under this initiative will have access to technology early preview version of the following:

  1. A cancer biomedical data science web portal to help your investigative team organize your translational cancer research projects;
  2. A cancer-specific software development plan to help your team harmonize your program’s cancer clinical, genomic, and imaging data;
  3. A roadmap of cancer genomic data analysis pipelines customized to your current and future program needs;
  4. Ongoing training opportunities for cancer informatics and data science for your team;
  5. Consultation support to your cancer cohort, cancer genomics, and cancer imaging analysis as a service through UAB Informatics Institute-led bioinformatics service support.

The UAB Informatics Institute leads the UAB campus in biomedical data science. Our research expertise covers a broad spectrum of biomedical informatics research topics, including epidemiology, genomics, functional genomics, clinical genomics, drug development, imaging, and mHealth application to translational sciences. U-BRITE is a new data science platform launched by the Informatics Institute, CCTS, and UAB Research Computing in 2019 that allows multi-disciplinary research teams to perform advanced data analytic methods on clinical, genomic, and other data types in a HIPAA-compliant, high-performance computing environment.

I welcome you to inquire with me about your project ideas after exploring this site. We wish to work with UAB cancer center leadership closely to recommend further actions to make your cancer research impactful in the years to come!

Yours sincerely,

Jake Y. Chen, Ph.D.
Professor of Genetics, Computer Science, and Biomedical Engineering
Chief Bioinformatics Officer & Associate Director, Informatics Institute
President-elect, MidSouth Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Society
Chief, Section on Informatics of the Genetics Department
UAB School of Medicine
Email: jakechen@uab.edu 

CC: Dr. Jim Cimino, Director of Informatics Institute

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