CTSI in the News
A reporter from the Rochester Business Journal recently caught up with CTSI co-director Karl Kieburtz, M.D., M.P.H., to talk about what the CTSI has been up to in the past 10 years.
The CTSI’s new focus on bioinformatics – using digital technology to collect and analyze massive amounts of data – was the major focus of the article. Over the past ten years, the CTSI researchers have kept pace with the boom in new technologies like FitBits and smartphones, and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter by using these technologies as research tools. Several research project in the Center for Human Experimental Therapeutics, which is tightly integrated with the CTSI, utilize these technologies to track aspects of physical and psychological health of individual patients or entire populations.
Recognizing the opportunity and burden presented by rapidly collect enormous amounts of data, the CTSI has forged new partnerships with bioinformatics groups across the University of Rochester, including the Goergen Institute for Data Science. Providing easily accessible bioinformatics resources to help researchers perform informatics-related projects is one of the CTSI’s new major aims.
Kieburtz, who is also the senior associate dean of Clinical Research and Robert J. Joynt Professor of Neurology at the University of Rochester Medical Center, also highlighted the recent change in the CTSI’s administrative structure – doing away with the typical hierarchy with a single administrator at the top in favor of a three equal partners directing the institute. As Kieburtz pointed out, he and his two co-directors, Martin Zand, M.D., professor of Nephrology and Public Health Sciences at URMC, and Nancy Bennett, M.D., director of the Center for Community Health and professor of Medicine and Public Health Sciences at URMC, all have different areas of expertise. Each brings something special to the table, fostering the spirit of innovation and collaboration that is endemic to the CTSI.
Michael Hazard | 6/9/2016
