Education & Training

The National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics (NCIBI) shares with the University of Michigan Medical School (UMMS) and U-M basic science departments the need for accessible and effective cross-training programs for all levels of personnel, from graduate student through faculty. This need is a direct result of the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of the biomedical and allied sciences. The newly formed U-M Center for Computational Medicine and Biology (CCMB) is strengthening the connections between other departments and researchers. These connections include not only Medical School departments and its Program in Biomedical Sciences (PIBS) that oversees graduate student training, but also departments such as Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Mathematics, Biostatistics, the School of Public Health and the School of Information. We are leveraging these interactions to greatly increase our ability to deliver cross-training by enlisting the wide range of departments and disciplines that will be a part of the NCIBI as co-developers of our cross-training programs.

We are formalizing the cross-training through the Certificate in Integrative Biomedical Informatics. As a part of the certificate program, new courses are being developed to introduce modern biological sciences and methods to those lacking that background, and similarly, courses to provide the biologists with background in computer or information science, or biostatistics. Postdoctoral fellows are expected to participate in the certificate program as one means of obtaining cross-disciplinary training.

Core 5 is working with Core 6 (Outreach and Dissemination) to develop educational materials around the Center’s activities and output. These materials include contributions from the other cores whose work is more focused on the computational research and implementation of analysis and search methods. An important facet is the interactions with the Driving Biological Problem (DBP) investigators (Core 3), who provide biomedical relevance to the project and help to define the biomedical query templates and concepts. Test cases developed by DBP researchers are making excellent frameworks for developing interactive case study learning tools that can be integrated into NCIBI’s web portal. Although initial education efforts are focused on NCIBI personnel, our educational materials will be brought to the national scientific community as tools, systems, and methods of data and knowledge integration are developed through workshops, seminars, and online NCIBI educational resources. These education efforts will also help in the recruitment of new NCIBI DBP collaborators, and postdocs and students for the research cores.

The educational activities of the NCIBI have the following Specific Aims:

1. Provide interdisciplinary training for all levels of NCIBI personnel by implementation of the Certificate in Integrative Biomedical Informatics program.

2. Establish innovative education and training programs that will leverage the Center’s integrated information and computational resources, facilitate collaborative activities, and foster community accessibility and data sharing and serve NCIBI developers, researchers, and users.

3. Educate the NIH researcher and user community on use of the NCIBI systems and tools, including best practices in the representation of experimental data and in the construction of the knowledge access and data analysis environment; and educate the community about data sharing and software dissemination.