The NIH Roadmap National Centers for Biomedical Computing (NCBC) Lecture Series Presents: “Computerizing the Human Studyome Using Tools from the National Center for Biomedical Ontology”

The human studyome is the totality of all human studies worldwide, encompassing all interventional, observational and qualitative research on human subjects. The human studyome is one of the most valuable sources of knowledge for advancing the understanding of diseases and treatments. To support efficient and effective use of human studies data, the human studyome needs to be computerized for large-scale discovery, reanalysis, and reuse.

Dr. Sim is a leader in the representation of human studies for scientific computation. In this talk, she will discuss her Driving Biological Project with the National Center for Biomedical Ontology, one of the seven NCBC Centers funded under the NIH Roadmap Initiatives, to use ontologies to visualize design heterogeneity in randomized trials. She will also discuss some observations on the benefits and challenges of applying ontologies and ontology tools to computerizing the human studyome and to clinical research in general.

Dr. Sim is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Director, Center for Clinical and Translational Informatics at the University of California, San Francisco. She received her MD and her PhD in Medical Informatics from Stanford University, and her Primary Care Internal Medicine training from the Massachussetts General Hospital. She is also fellowship-trained in General Internal Medicine at Stanford University. Her research focus is on knowledge-based technologies for clinical research and evidence-based practice. She received the United States Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2000 for her work on The Trial Bank Project, which developed fundamental informatics technologies for a computable knowledge base of randomized trials. She has since led multiple projects related to semantic standards and visualization methods for clinical research, clinical trial reporting bias, new models of scientific e-publication of clinical research, and work on the adoption of electronic health records in primary care practices for quality improvement. In policy work, Dr. Sim was the founding Project Coordinator of the World Health Organization’s International Clinical Trials Registry Platform, which sets global standards on clinical trial registration and reporting. Dr. Sim serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics, is on the Advisory Board for PLoS One, and is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics.

For more information, visit http://www.ncbcs.org/