2023 – 2025
Youping Deng, PhD
Professor
Director of Bioinformatics Core Facility
Department of Quantitative Health Sciences
John A. Burns School of Medicine
Strengthening Data Science Capacity for Biomedical Research Advancement at Hawaii
Project Summary: There is no doubt that biomedical science has become a data-intensive field. Over the last decade, we have witnessed the booming of new biomedical technologies that generate massive volumes of biodata. This massive amount of data includes various types of omics-data, Electronic Health Record (EHR) data, petabytes of imaging, and more. With advancements in data science, it is now feasible to access and mine the massive amount of clinical and phenotypic data. Data science skills involve how to use computational methods and algorithms to analyze, manage, and interpret different types of data, and require interdisciplinary knowledge such as biomedical domain knowledge, computational programming, statistics, and mathematics. The Center for Pacific Innovations, Knowledge, and Opportunities (PIKO) is building a statewide clinical and translational research (CTR) infrastructure to improve the health of Indigenous Pacific People (IPP) – defined as Native Hawaiians, Other Pacific Islanders, and Filipinos. More data science expertise is required for the center to perform data intensive clinical and translational research and improve the health and well-being of the indigenous Pacific People (IPP). Located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Hawaii is in great needs local data scientists to provide data science support, training and conduct data science research related to health disparities and other sciences. To enhance the data science capacity in Hawaii PIKO, we plan to accomplish the following aims: Aim 1: Offer education and training opportunities in data science-related skills to students and scientists at all stages of development. Aim 2: Enhance biomedical research through the interactions with the Data Science Infrastructure. Aim 3: Establish data science partnerships with researchers from diverse fields as well as other collaborative partners. Completing the aims will add significance by addressing all the three program objectives: growing human capital with data science competencies, expanding infrastructure to support data science research, training, and education, and building data science partnerships