Within the Center for Biomedical Informatics (CBMI), I facilitate information discovery and dissemination while building collaborative relationships among scientists within Washington University and across institutions. My research focus employs best practices and new technologies concerning data acquisition, management, distribution, and dissemination.

A primary research interest is to build tools and cognitive capacity so data can have meaning, which researchers can use in making health decisions. Within WUSM, I facilitate the adoption and incorporation of best practices in a clinical database management system (ClinPortal) and the adoption and understanding of aggregate electronic medical record data through CIDER. Additionally, I oversee the education and training of in health informatics within the CBMI team and across campus.

The second area of interest I have is to expand methods and develop means to make data and information discoverable. Using the semantic web technology of VIVO[4], I have led the implementation effort at WUSM and evaluated the program at the national level. This was a multi-institutional grant creating a tool for researchers to discover one another and institutions to better understand their researchers. This has lead to an open community of VIVO implementers and developers to which I have contributed writings on the public wiki in addition to sharing standardized data[5].

Working with Cornell University, I am now implementing and facilitating the development of DataStaR , another program built with semantic technology, to make data more discoverable. We believe the long-term impact of dynamic linked-data connections between distributed, locally maintained repositories of information about researchers, research datasets, and the datasets themselves has not yet been fully recognized.