DBMI lies at the intersection of computational methods, basic biology, and clinical practice. Our department works to address the spectrum of informatics challenges that are preventing the future of precision medicine, including:

  • Health care-related systems infrastructure and data (the ‘clinical’ component of biomedical informatics).
  • Discovery and understanding of human health and disease at a molecular and naturally occurring systems level (the ‘bio’ component represented by bioinformatics methods and algorithms, and computational biology).

Through faculty research and scholarship, DBMI sifts through the data noise to ultimately improve the diagnosis, treatment, outcomes, and overall health and well-being for patients and their families.

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Biomedical Informatics: What and Why

Our masters, PhD, fellowship, and intensive educational programs are designed for students, postdocs, and faculty to actively engage in and contribute to the growing body of biomedical science, medical practice, education, and research, with a core focus in:

  • Knowledge representation for scientific discovery
  • Knowledge discovery from multiple, heterogeneous, and diverse data sources
  • Probabilistic and/or heuristic linkage of health-related data
  • Extraction of knowledge from narrative text in biomedical science and clinical practice
  • Prediction from data
  • Decision-making and planning under uncertainty
  • Modeling of organismal biology at multiple scales for prediction, explanation, and education
  • Simulated expert behavior

DBMI’s educational programs, coupled with our department’s mission and vision, attract individuals and interdisciplinary collaborators from all around the world who share the same drive to be part of the next generation of biomedical investigators and care providers. Previously known as the Center for Biomedical Informatics, DBMI was founded in 2015 with the vision and knowledge that data is at the heart of precise and individualized clinical care. As one of 11 basic and social science departments which comprise the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School, DBMI has earned an international reputation for its productive research and technology collaborations, and collective knowledge aimed at solving the greatest problems of human health.