July 18, 2008 | Eli Freund - School of Engineering

Clinical & Translational Medicine

Faculty members across the University, including 10 Computer Science & Engineering (CSE) faculty members and researchers from the UConn Health Center, are collaborating on a novel initiative aimed at transforming the manner in which clinical and translational science research is conducted worldwide. Three years ago, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began its Clinical and […]

Staci Anson at her home in New Jersey. Photo by Jordan Bender

Faculty members across the University, including 10 Computer Science & Engineering (CSE) faculty members and researchers from the UConn Health Center, are collaborating on a novel initiative aimed at transforming the manner in which clinical and translational science research is conducted worldwide. Three years ago, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began its Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) program to speed up the translation of scientific research into practical applications in the medical field.

The University is submitting a proposal to join the CTSA consortium, which currently links 38 academic health centers in 23 states. CSE professor Steven Demurjian is among seven core coordinators of the proposed effort. He will be responsible for biomedical informatics (BMI) in support of the CTSA and within a newly-formed Connecticut Institute for Clinical & Translational Science (CICaTS).

The CICaTS biomedical informatics core area comprises six focal areas and will involve the participation of CSE faculty members Sanguthevar Rajasekaran, Dong-Guk Shin, Ion Mandoiu, Reda Ammar, Chun-Hsi Huang, Ian Greenshields, Aggelos Kiayias, Alex Russell, Jun-Hong Cui and Bing Wang as well as Electrical & Computer Engineering professor Quing Zhu. The focal areas include:

  • Translational and clinical research informatics – representing the informatics necessary to support translational research and clinical studies.
  • Medical and clinical informatics – representing the use of informatics in the practice of medicine, from single-physician practices to community health centers to clinics and hospitals.
  • Bio/Genome informatics – representing the variety of data analyses tools, algorithms, and techniques needed to support research from the bench to the bedside and back again.
  • Data warehousing and data mining – representing the computing infrastructure needed to establish data warehouses/repositories, and data mining and querying techniques to provide access to CICaTS faculty researchers and members.
  • Super and grid computing – representing the computing infrastructure needed for compute-intensive and/or data-intensive analyses.
  • Standards, security, databases, and networks – representing the computing infrastructure that impacts all six focal areas and deals with necessary standards for health care and data exchange, information security and usage, database interoperability, and network level exchange.

To learn more about their collaborative research, contact Dr. Demurjian at steve@engr.uconn.edu.