Training Grants

Educating the next generation of a biomedical workforce to advance health science and practice via the application of informatics to research and discovery

Current Training Grants

T32 COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES TO DIABETES AND METABOLISM

The University of Utah is the recipient of a Computational Approaches to Diabetes and Metabolism Research T32 Training Grant, which is designed to cross-train a cadre of predoctoral and postdoctoral trainees in the computational and mathematical sciences and in the biological basis of diabetes and obesity. These bioinformatics scientist trainees will gain the expertise and leadership skills to apply computational and mathematical methods to complex biological questions that will ultimately impact the prevention, treatment, and outcomes of people with diabetes and related metabolic diseases. This training program is a combination of mentored research and career development training, coursework, and extensive interactions with faculty and trainees across campus and beyond.

T15 TRAINING GRANT IN BIOMEDICAL INFORMATICS AND DATA SCIENCE

The NLM T15 program at the University of Utah has a long history of innovating healthcare delivery and biomedical research. Biomedical Informatics has traditionally moved biomedicine forward by studying information and its use within intelligent systems. Data Science is a highly synergistic discipline that enables us to extract information from data, with a focus on increasingly large data. In this program, we combine these approaches to enable a wide range of research discoveries. Our goal is to empower our trainees through education and experience to be independent, innovative, and self-directed scientists who are able to transform data into knowledge and impact the manner in which knowledge is applied to real-world situations to improve the health of individuals and populations.

PROGRAM DIRECTOR

Karen Eilbeck, PhD

Dr. Eilbeck leads both the NIDDK Computational Approaches to Diabetes and Metabolism T32 training grant for the Department of Biomedical Informatics and the NLM T15 Training Grant in Biomedical Informatics and Data Science, thus allowing coordination between both programs. She is a Core Educator at the University of Utah School of Medicine where she directs Host and Defense for first-year medical students and integrates Health System Science concepts including informatics into the curriculum. The embedded nature of her educational activities opens doors for collaboration across the school and increases student recruitment from the MD-PhD program. Dr. Eilbeck’s research focuses on knowledge representation around genomic annotation. In her current work with the Utah Department of Health, her research team is cataloging and understanding variant annotations for metabolic disorders and developing health IT standards for dissemination. She has contributed to many national genomic annotation efforts including the Gene Ontology Consortium, the ClinVar database, and the ClinGen Consortium. She also co-leads the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) working group for genomic annotation. DBMI has extensive oversight of the computational and informatics research capabilities at the UofU and Dr. Eilbeck is committed to preparing computational scientist trainees to both improve health outcomes and increase biological understanding.

Career Paths

Learn about the many different paths in Biomedical Informatics that can lead to new exciting careers!