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Degree Programs

NYU Graduate Training Program in Biomedical Informatics (BMI)

A Brief History of Biomedical Informatics as a Discipline

The field of Biomedical informatics is surprisingly old. In Germany, the first professional organization for informatics, currently known as the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Medizinische Dokumentation, Informatik und Statistik, was founded by Gustav Wagner in 1949. The first appearance of medical informatics (broadly defined to include “biomedical informatics” as well as “health informatics”) as a term ("Informatique Medicale") occurred in France during the 1960s. Specialized university departments and training programs for medical informatics were created as early as the 1960s in France, Germany, Belgium, and The Netherlands. During the 1970s, dedicated medical informatics research units also appeared in Poland, and in the U.S. (the identifying term being "Informatiyki Medycznej", and "Medical Informatics" respectively). Today the International Medical Informatics Association has 54 dues-paying national associations as members covering a spectrum of economic development, from the least industrialized nations (e.g., Bosnia, Cuba, Nigeria), to the most highly-developed ones (e.g., the U.S., Switzerland, Canada, France, Germany, the U.K., and Japan). Development of high-quality biomedical informatics research, education, infrastructure and applications, has been a specific goal of both the European Union (e.g., the Advanced Informatics in Medicine program), as well as of the U.S. This latter commitment has been implemented mainly through NLM, an NIH branch that since the mid-80s has been funding medical informatics education at the graduate and post-graduate levels at 18 “Centers of excellence”). The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) has issued recommendations regarding the importance of and the approaches needed for successful introduction of biomedical informatics education in US medical schools.

In the years between the emergence of the electronic digital computer and today, biomedical informatics was defined several times to reflect the directions and scientific advances in the field. Biomedical informatics is a non-exclusionary term that subsumes all health–related informatics sub-disciplines (e.g., Nursing and Dental Informatics). Furthermore, the term “Biomedical Informatics” has effectively replaced ”Medical Informatics” in the U.S. today (to reflect the importance of bioinformatics and the integration of bioinformatics with health informatics.

Formal Training in Biomedical Informatics at NYU

Experience with formal training programs in informatics in the US since the NIH (NLM) started to fund them in the mid-1980s has shown that students in these programs are excellent researchers and collaborators in clinical, basic science and translational projects since they have diverse backgrounds spanning clinical medicine, biology and computational/quantitative disciplines. In addition, affiliation of faculty throughout the university with the program and the invariably ensuing joint mentorship is a proven mechanism for bringing faculty together and cultivating interdisciplinary collaborations and awareness of research interests, and skills. The director of CHIBI, Dr. Aliferis designed and was Founding Director of the Vanderbilt MS/PhD Program in Biomedical Informatics, which quickly achieved national prominence due to the academic and professional success of its graduates and its curricular qualities and has sustained NIH funding since its inception in 2000. The Vanderbilt Program, under Dr Aliferis’ leadership was the first in the US to establish a PhD concentration area in “Translational Bioinformatics” and “Information Retrieval in Support of Evidence Based Medicine.” In addition, the Vanderbilt Program curriculum had several specialty tracks in Clinical Informatics. Many students have chosen these concentration areas since its inception and have followed excellent career paths in academia and industry. Dr. Aliferis has been charged by NYUMC to use the extensive existing resources and human capital in NYU to establish an innovative MS and PhD/Post-doctoral training program of the highest caliber. The new program will be designed to meet the challenges and opportunities of a radically changing landscape in biology and medicine in which informatics plays a central role for improved biomedical discovery and patient care. The new program will be leveraged by the education Informatics resources of CHIBI, and affiliated entities such as the Medical Library, Biostatistics, Computer Science, Human Genetics, the Courant Institute, and the Computational Biology Program. The NYU Training Program is scheduled to be launched in 2010.