Message from the Program Directors
Peter L. Elkin, MD
Ram Samudrala, PhD
We are committed to training students to be the researchers needed to make our discipline what it must be: an essential key to improving health care’s efficacy, efficiency, safety and responsiveness.
Our short-term program builds on our graduate and postdoctoral programs with our existing faculty and outside mentors — in addition to world-renowned experts who provide workshops and more.
UB: Leading Bioinformatics Research
Our department was founded in 2013, but biomedical informatics research at the University at Buffalo is neither new nor inconsequential. UB has long been a leading center of research on standards and ontologies in clinical and translational research.
UB scientists play key roles in gene ontology, data standards and interoperable data exchanges. UB ontologists have advanced health IT through terminology initiatives, diagnostic decision support, EHR research, HIEs and standardization and medical natural language understanding.
UB researchers developed the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), adopted nationally and internationally for the description and storage of biomedical data. Further, our researchers are currently mapping national standard terminologies, SNOMED CT, LOINC and RxNORM, into the BFO framework and will integrate clinical data with large volumes of omics data annotated with scientific ontologies (e.g., gene, cell, and protein ontology).
Increasing the Pipeline to Important Careers
We’ve aligned our training experiences with the successful Collaborative Learning and Integrated Mentoring in the Biosciences (CLIMB UP) program, including iSEED and other CLIMB programs at UB.
What’s the strategy behind this alignment? Well, we aim to ensure that as many students as possible are exposed to the fields of biomedical informatics and data science.
We feel it’s crucial to increase the pipeline to data science and biomedical informatics careers.
A Bright Future: Biomedical Informatics
We invite you to explore our curriculum and research opportunities and familiarize yourself with our talented faculty members, who are eager to share their knowledge.
We have created a program that goes beyond the specifics of research in implementation, technology and clinical care to also integrate the synergistic research skills and orientations needed for biomedical informatics to achieve its promise.
We hope you’ll join us.
Sincerely,
Peter L. Elkin, MD, program director
Professor and chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics; professor of internal medicine
Ram Samudrala, PhD, program director
Professor and chief of the Division of Bioinformatics
