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The Department of Biomedical Informatics
College of Physicians and Surgeons

Health Sciences Division , Columbia University

Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center (CPMC) is one of the largest voluntary hospital centers in the country, with over 1100 beds. It is located in the Washington Heights/Inwood section of northern Manhattan and is the only major medical center in this area. The population served is disproportionately composed of racial and ethnic minorities and the poor. The medical center incorporates both the uptown campus of the New York Presbyterian Healthcare System and the Health Sciences Division of Columbia University. The DBMI is a department in the College of Physicians and Surgeons, one of the four schools in the Health Sciences Division of Columbia University, all of which are co-located with the hospitals and clinics of CPMC. The other schools at Columbia University are located some 50 blocks south in Manhattan, at the Morningside Campus centered at Broadway and 116th Street. We have close ties with programs and individuals in all the other Health Science schools as well as the Engineering School on the main campus of the university:

  • School of Dentistry and Oral Surgery -- John Zimmerman, DDS, is one of our faculty members and oversees the dental informatics component of our training program.
  • School of Nursing -- Suzanne Bakken, RN, DNSc is jointly appointed in our department and is closely involved with both our research and teaching programs.
  • School of Public Health -- Rita Kukafka, DrPH, MA, is jointly appointed in DBMI and the Division of SocioMedical Sciences in the School of Public Health; she is taking the lead in designing the public health informatics components of our curriculum.
  • In addition, we have an active, ongoing relationship with the Columbia Genome Center. Our first bioinformatics faculty member, Andrey Rzhetsky, PhD is jointly appointed in the Genome Center and has his laboratory space in that building. We are recruiting two more faculty members in bioinformatics to work at the interface between DBMI and the Genome Center. All faculty, plus their students, will be located in the Genome Center so that they can work closely with other scientists there.
  • We also coordinate closely with the Department of Computer Science in the Fu School of Engineering and Applied Sciences on the main Morningside Heights campus of Columbia University. We cross-list some of our courses in order to expose computer scientists and undergraduates to biomedical informatics topics. There are also several collaborative research projects between members of the two departments, including a large digital libraries project on which the principal investigator is Kathy McKeown, PhD and for which several collaborators and experimental sites are drawn from the DBMI and the health sciences campus.
  • There are strong ties between the DBMI and the Department of Psychiatry, with joint training opportunities and research collaborations.
  • Our department is the home for Columbia’s Center for Advanced Technology (CAT) in Information Management, funded by the State of New York through the NY State Office of Science, Technology, and Academic Research (NYSTAR) . This program funds 15 centers in the state, each devoted to technology transfer activities aimed at creating new economic opportunities in New York. Dr. Shortliffe is director of Columbia’s CAT, with Dr. James Cimino from DBMI and Prof. Kathy McKeown from computer science as the co-directors. The deputy director, Dr. Vincent Tomaselli, oversees the day to day operation of the CAT, including its internal grants program. Because the CAT is a collaboration among the DBMI, Computer Science Department, and the Columbia Genome Center, it is an explicit indication of the active cross-disciplinary links that characterize our research and training environment.
  • We have a close and important relationship with the Office of Scholarly Resources and the Health Sciences Library on our campus. Directed by Pat Molholt, MLS, PhD, the Office of Scholarly Resources has major research projects in educational visualization and provides an important site for projects by our students. Dr. Molholt and her colleagues, Dr. Hilary Schmidt and Dr. Celina Imielinska, have also been important contributors to our educational programs.
  • We also have forged new but promising relationships with the New York Academy of Medicine (NYAM). The NYAM is the regional medical library for our part of the country, and it also has an active research program in urban health. With a large continuing education program and well-established ties into the community, including the public schools, the Academy is a promising site for collaborative research applying information technology to problems in urban health and information delivery to clinicians.
  • We also have forged new but promising relationships with the New York Academy of Medicine (NYAM). The NYAM is the regional medical library for our part of the country, and it also has an active research program in urban health. With a large continuing education program and well-established ties into the community, including the public schools, the Academy is a promising site for collaborative research applying information technology to problems in urban health and information delivery to clinicians.

Finally, we have close ties with many of the clinical departments in the College of Physicians and Surgeons. Many of our faculty members have joint appointments in other medical school departments including Medicine, Anesthesiology, Psychiatry, and Radiology.