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An update from Strategic Plan Goal 2 Interim Leader Dajiang Liu, PhD

Dajiang Liu, PhD, interim leader for Penn State College of Medicine‘s Strategic Plan Goal 2: Biomedical Artificial Intelligence, updated College of Medicine faculty, staff and students and Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center staff on progress made toward achieving the goal’s objectives.

Dear colleagues,

Happy New Year! This time of the year we think about the goals we want to set for ourselves personally and professionally. As interim director for Penn State College of Medicine’s Strategic Plan Goal 2, I am excited for our research community to continue positioning ourselves as a leader in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and biomedical informatics to address complex biology and health challenges.

This year, in addition to searching for and hiring faculty to help us achieve the aims of Goal 2, we have launched a pilot funding program. These seed grants will provide individual researchers and collaborative teams with support to use large datasets, biomedical informatics and/or machine learning to solve key biological or health-related problems. We will also host a workshop in early 2023 to highlight informatics and AI research projects that use the All of Us study – a National Institutes of Health flagship project under the Precision Medicine Initiative.

Are you interested in learning more about how to apply large datasets, machine learning or informatics to your research?

The Goal 2 team is here to collaborate with College of Medicine researchers to help you realize the potential of using AI and informatics approaches and large datasets to solve complex biology and health-related problems.

Research highlights of machine learning applications from the Goal 2 team and related work by other College of Medicine researchers include using machine learning methods to identify drugs that we can repurpose to treat new diseases, utilizing AI methods to predict disease risk using microbiome and multi-omics data, harnessing AI to reduce the impact of adverse childhood events, applying machine learning to develop a suicide vulnerability index and using informatics approaches to integrate diverse datasets.

I am excited to lead the Goal 2 team’s efforts in AI and biomedical informatics as the College of Medicine advances our strategic plan. Keep an eye out for related funding announcements and upcoming events in The COMmunicator. In the meantime, if you have questions about how you can get involved with efforts to move Goal 2 forward, please contact me.

Dajiang Liu, PhD
Interim Director
Goal 2 – Penn State College of Medicine Strategic Plan

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