The Department of Surgery is pleased to announce the creation of our new Division of Computational Health Sciences! 

The Division's mission is to drive innovative approaches to discover knowledge from large-scale and multi-modal data in biomedical research and clinical care. These approaches, such as data mining, natural language processing, human-computer interaction, omics-based frameworks, knowledge representation, and other complementary interdisciplinary methods, provide novel and compelling insights toward optimizing health and patient outcomes. 
 
Led by founding Division Chief, Rui Zhang, PhD, FAMIA, an expert in biomedical informatics with an emphasis on artificial intelligence and clinical natural language processing, the Division will work together to leverage insights from big data that includes electronic health records (EHRs), biomedical literature, and patient-generated data. Dr. Zhang is also co-leading the Innovative Methods & Data Science (IMDS) program at the Center for Learning Health System Sciences (CLHSS). Assistant Professor, Brian Steffen, PhD, joining Dr. Zhang in the new Division, will provide insight into epidemiological, clinical research and community health. Assistant Professor, Rubina Rizvi, MD, PhD, also serving as digital innovation integration lead at the CLHSS, joins the new Division and will provide expertise in human-computer interaction, usability evaluations, and implementation science. 

The Division of Computational Health Sciences initiatives will support the Department of Surgery's research commitment as an academic center of excellence by providing a supportive environment that enables transformative discoveries and innovations that produce novel translational clinical research.

The Division of Computational Health Sciences invites faculty, staff and trainees from the various areas of the Department to reach out and collaborate with our new team through research ideas that can be addressed using biomedical and clinical data to work on joint research projects and grant opportunities.
 

Contact the Division of Computational Health Sciences - zhan1386@umn.edu.