AIM-AHEAD Training Programs - Call for Applications

Wednesday, November 6, 2024

AIM-AHEAD is excited to launch several new training programs, each designed to further develop a diverse workforce of researchers who are proficient in AI/ML and eager to address unmet needs in underrepresented communities.

Postgraduates, graduate students, postdocs, healthcare workers, and all early-career researchers are encouraged to apply! You may apply to multiple training programs, but if accepted into more than one, you can only participate in one.

The deadline for all Training Program Applications is November 18, 2024 by 11:59 p.m. ET.

Apply Now!

Bioinformatics Specialist

The Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (CBIIT) is seeking an experienced Bioinformatics Specialist (GS 14). The selected candidate will provide expert leadership, oversight, and direction for all aspects of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Federated Learning (FL) programs, projects, and advisory services in support of NCI research programs.

See detailed position details, requirements, and application instructions on USAJOBS.

November Data Sharing and Reuse Seminar

Friday, November 8, 2024

Karthik Gangavarapu, Ph.D. will present "Advancing Outbreak Surveillance: From data integration to actionable insights" on November 8, 2024, from 12:00 p.m.–1:00p.m. ET.

About the Seminar

In response to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern, the global scientific community through unprecedented effort has sequenced and shared over 17 million genomes as of October 2024. This extraordinarily high sampling rate provides a unique opportunity to track the evolution of the virus in near real-time. More recently, wastewater sequencing has emerged as an alternative to sequencing clinical samples for cost-efficient genomic surveillance. We developed outbreak.info as a platform that uses publicly available clinical and wastewater-based genomic data to provide insights for researchers, public health officials, and the general public. We built scalable data pipelines to ingest heterogeneous sources of SARS-CoV-2 variant data and used the BioThings SDK to develop server infrastructure for widespread data dissemination via a high-performance API. Using this API, we provide interpretable visualizations through our web application and programmatic access to the processed data through our Python and R packages. Outbreak.info can be used for genomic surveillance and as a hypothesis-generation tool to understand the outbreaks at varying geographic and temporal scales.

About the Speaker

Karthik Gangavarapu is an Institute Investigator at Scripps Research, specializing in computational biology with an emphasis on infectious disease research. He has led large-scale collaborative projects that apply phylogenetic and phylodynamic methods to understand the transmission dynamics of rapidly evolving viruses, including Zika and SARS-CoV-2. He has developed widely used software for genomic epidemiology such as iVar and outbreak.info. He has also made important contributions to BEAGLE, a library that accelerates numerical calculations for statistical phylogenetics, used by sophisticated phylogenetics software such as BEAST.

About the Seminar Series

The seminar is open to the public and registration is required each month. Individuals who need interpreting services and/or other reasonable accommodations to participate in this event should contact Allison Hurst at 301-670-4990. Requests should be made at least five days in advance of the event.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Data Science Strategy hosts this seminar series to highlight exemplars of data sharing and reuse on the second Friday of each month at noon ET. The monthly series highlights researchers who have taken existing data and found clever ways to reuse the data or generate new findings. A different NIH institute or center will also share its data science activities each month.

Quantum Computing: New Frontiers in Biomedical Research Innovation Lab

Thursday, September 26, 2024

Application Deadline: October 13, 2024

Quantum computing opens the door to new ways of thinking about biomedical research problems and new avenues of research. ODSS and NCI are coordinating a challenge for participants to brainstorm opportunities for research that prompt the development of quantum algorithms that address biomedical problems (e.g., cancer research) with a clear plan for simulating a demonstration of a quantum advantage for the novel approach over classical approaches to the same problem. Application deadline for this ‘Quantum Computing: New Frontiers in Biomedical Research Innovation Lab’ event is October 13, 2024.

 Learn more and apply:

October Data Sharing and Reuse Seminar

Friday, October 11, 2024

Maryellen L. Giger, Ph.D. will present The Role of MIDRC in Medical Imaging AI on October 11, 2024, from 12:00 p.m.–1:00p.m. EDT.

About the Seminar

Artificial intelligence (AI) in medical imaging involves research in task-based discovery, predictive modeling, robust clinical translation, and patient engagement. Quantitative radiomic analyses and deep networks are yielding novel image-based tumor characterizations (i.e., signatures that may ultimately contribute to the design of patient-specific diagnostics and treatments). To enable the development of trustworthy AI, however, curated, diverse, and reusable data is needed. This presentation will discuss the role of the Medical Imaging and Data Resource Center (MIDRC) (midrc.org; data.midrc.org) in medical imaging AI, with a specific focus on curated real-world data, representative data, validation methods and sequestered data, understanding of potential biases, and sustainability. The open data and open resources of MIDRC will be described, eventually leading to their impact on clinical AI and patient care.

About the Speaker

Maryellen Giger, Ph.D., is the A.N. Pritzker Distinguished Service Professor of Radiology, Committee on Medical Physics, and the College at The University of Chicago. Her AI research related to risk assessment, diagnosis, prognosis, and therapeutic response in cancer, neuroimaging, COVID-19, and other diseases has yielded various translated components, including “virtual biopsies” in imaging-genomics association studies. She is the contact principal investigator on the NIBIB-funded MIDRC, which has ingested more than 500,000 medical imaging studies and currently has more than 175,000 imaging studies publicly available for use by AI investigators. In 2023, MIDRC was selected as an initial performer in ARPA-H and received the 2023 DataWorks Prize (FASEB and NIH Office of Data Science Strategy: Distinguished Achievement Award, “MIDRC – Sharable Curated Diverse Medical Images at Scale”). Giger has more than 280 peer-reviewed publications and has more than 30 patents, and has mentored over 100 graduate students, residents, medical students, and undergraduate students. Giger is a former president of AAPM and SPIE, a past member of the NIBIB Advisory Council of NIH, and past editor-in-chief of the Journal of Medical Imaging (2013-2023); a member of the National Academy of Engineering; a recipient of the AAPM William D. Coolidge Gold Medal, the SPIE Director’s Award, the SPIE Harrison H. Barrett Award in Medical Imaging, the RSNA’s Honored Educator Award, and the RSNA’s Outstanding Researcher Award; and a Fellow of AAPM, AIMBE, SPIE, SBMR, IEEE, IAMBE, and COS. In 2013, Giger was named by the International Congress on Medical Physics as one of 50 medical physicists with the most impact on the field in the last 50 years. Giger was a cofounder of Quantitative Insights (QI), Inc., which started through the 2009–2010 New Venture Challenge at The University of Chicago. QI produced QuantX, which in 2017, became the first FDA-cleared, machine learning–driven system to aid in cancer diagnosis. In 2019, QuantX was named one of Time magazine’s inventions of the year and was bought by Qlarity Imaging.

https://profiles.uchicago.edu/profiles/display/37081 

About the Seminar Series

The seminar is open to the public and registration is required each month. Individuals who need interpreting services and/or other reasonable accommodations to participate in this event should contact Janiya Peters at 301-670-4990. Requests should be made at least five days in advance of the event.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Data Science Strategy hosts this seminar series to highlight exemplars of data sharing and reuse on the second Friday of each month at noon ET. The monthly series highlights researchers who have taken existing data and found clever ways to reuse the data or generate new findings. A different NIH institute or center will also share its data science activities each month.