Dean of the Faculty of Medicine Jeffrey S. Flier welcomed council members to the dinner meeting and said that he hoped that the venue would provide an opportunity for people to get better acquainted.
Dean Flier provided a brief overview of the Faculty Council, stating that the council is truly the only elected body in the HMS governance structure and it provides a valued source of advice and counsel to him on a variety of School-wide issues. He described some of the issues that the council recently spent considerable time discussing, including the consideration and approval of the University’s draft Title IX policy and the School’s Open Access policy.
Last month, Dean Flier met with Priscilla Slanetz, the newly elected Faculty Council vice-chair, to discuss possible agenda items for the 2014-2015 council meetings. He noted that Slanetz will work with the Docket Committee to advance an agenda that will best utilize the council’s thinking and experiences.
Dean Flier then introduced Slanetz, who spoke briefly about the role of the Docket Committee and proposed agenda items, including curriculum reform and external education. Slanetz introduced the faculty members who have agreed to serve on the Docket Committee: Vicki Rosen, Ellen Grant, Scott Podolsky, Sunil Eappen, Peter Howley, Susan Pauker and Maureen Connelly. She encouraged all members to reach out to her with suggestions for the agenda.
After dinner, Dean Flier gave introductory remarks before presenting a proposal that a Quadrangle-based Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) be created at HMS. As background, he summarized the history of the Center for Biomedical Informatics (CBMI), which was created 10 years ago and has been located in the Countway Library.
Following a year of intensive planning and discussion with a broad base of the HMS community, the proposal to transition CBMI to an academic department was developed. Dean Flier concluded that biomedical informatics can impact human health and biomedical research in new ways. Last summer, he convened an expert external advisory group to help evaluate the School’s readiness to create an academic department in this area. Among other observations, the panel said that CBMI, if transformed into a department, would be well positioned to have greater impact if its biomedical informaticians have an academic home from which to launch collaborations.
Dean Flier then introduced Isaac Kohane to present his vision for DBMI. Kohane thanked Dean Flier for providing the opportunity to speak to the Faculty Council. He described his view of the opportunities for research and collaborations across HMS institutions. Among the areas he identified were big data, clinical systems automation, global health initiatives, cycling between model organisms and model populations, real- time epidemiology, and decision science through a genomic lens. He presented examples that included a tapestry of potentially high-value information sources that may be linked to an individual for use in health care and a neuropsychiatric genome scale and RDoC individualized domains. Kohane also presented his plans for education and training opportunities in DBMI and described MMSc and PhD programs, certification programs, boot camps and nanocourses, and executive education.
After a general discussion, Dean Flier adjourned the meeting.
