UH Med Now

The University of Hawaii John A. Burns School of Medicine (JABSOM) has been awarded a grant of $317,955 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in particular, the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHHD), for Research Centers in Minority Institutions (RCMI). This grant titled ‘Hawaii Data Science Training for RCMI Researchers’ is part of the NIH funded “Ola HAWAII – Health And Wellness Attained by Impacting Inequities in Hawaii,” led by Drs. Jerris Hedges and Noreen Mokuau.

Youping Deng, PhD, Director of Bioinformatics Core at JABSOM, leads a team of data scientists to offer biomedical data science training for RCMI researchers and Hawaii institutions. RCMI supports specialized research centers in institutions that offer doctoral degrees in the health professions or the sciences related to health and have an historical and current commitment to educating underrepresented students.

“There is little doubt that biomedical science has become data-intensive science. In the last decade, we have witnessed the booming of new biomedical technologies [as they] generate massive amounts of bio-data. This massive data includes various types of omics-data, Electronic Health Record (EHR) data, petabytes of imaging, and so on.” Deng said, “It is essential to train data science skills for RCMI investigators. As we are located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, it is hard for Hawaii-based health-disparities investigators to travel to the US continent to receive structured data science training and project-focused analytical support and interactive training.  Hawaii investigators desperately need local data science trainers.”

Thanks to this grant, the bioinformatic core team at JABSOM and its collaborators will offer lectures, seminars, bootcamps, and workshops to RCMI trainers, investigators, students, and community partners.

They will primarily focus on data science skills of different types of “omics” including high-throughput next generation sequencing (NGS), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning skills using real biomedical data. They will also provide data science related for-credit courses to RCMI students and scientists. 

In addition to training RCMI investigators and their collaborators in structured programs, the bioinformatic core team will also offer individual data science training for investigators managing large health and bio-datasets to foster collaborations between health-disparities investigators and our data science experts.

Article by Youping Deng,  PhD
Professor, Director of Bioinformatics Core
Department of Quantitative Health Sciences
Co-Director, Genomics and Bioinformatics Shared Resources
University of Hawai’i Cancer Center
University of Hawai’i John A. Burns School of Medicine

Edited by Paula Bender, JABSOM News

Paula Bender graphic.