Biomedical Informatics Doctoral Dissertation

After completing all course requirements, the Oral Examination, and the Research Preparation Examination, the student obtains the approval of the advisory committee for admission into the Ph.D. program. The student begins the preparation of a dissertation, generally building on the topic that was the subject of their Research Preparation Examination.

Thesis Proposal

Who: PhD Student

When: Oral presentation of the dissertation proposal for approval by the dissertation committee should be scheduled within six months after completion of the MPhil degree. The internal members of the dissertation committee must receive a copy of the proposal four weeks prior to the scheduled oral presentation or defense.

Why:  The dissertation proposal is the first step in the development of the dissertation and is required to ensure the viability of the dissertation topic. 

What:  The proposal must be an original and significant contribution to the field of Biomedical Informatics.  The project described in the proposal must be reasonable in scope and grounded in the existing literature.  The dissertation proposal should consist of no more than 30 pages and include the following:

Chapter I:  Introduction (Overview of Thesis)

• Problem Statement
• Purpose of Study
• Research Questions/Hypotheses
• Experimental Design Associated with Hypotheses
• Significance
• Contributions
• Limitations

Chapter II:  Background and Related Work

• Historical Background
• Literature Review
• Review of Theories Related to Topic

Chapter III:  Methodology (Details of Thesis)

• Research Questions/Hypotheses
• Preliminary Studies (Optional)
• Experimental Design Applied (e.g., data sources, data collection, analysis, evaluation, etc.)

IV: Timeline

  V: Bibliography  

Students download the Report of the Dissertation Proposal Committee from the GSAS Office of Dissertations website for the Committee prior to the defense.  Following the successful proposal defense, students are required to submit the approved Report of the Dissertation Proposal Committee to the graduate program coordinator for processing.

Where Students should schedule their dissertation proposal defense in either VC5 Conference Room via the conference room scheduling form on the web or the Irving 8th Floor Conference Room.The first hour of the thesis proposal defense is open to the public.  The second hour is closed.  

Final Thesis Defense

A final University-mandated thesis defense is then presented at the end of Ph.D. training, just before the dissertation document is submitted to the university. Ph.D. theses are expected to provide significant innovative insights and new results that add to the knowledge of biobiomedical informatics. Students are generally required to have written running computer programs that illustrate the practical applicability of the ideas they have developed. There is a major emphasis on including some type of evaluation of the work, keyed to the initial hypothesis. Dissertations must be written according to Columbia University guidelines and will generally follow the same chapter outline described above for the proposal. A template in Microsoft Word is available for download. When the student's primary advisor deems the dissertation acceptable, a defense is scheduled. The remainder of the research committee will have been involved with the research and will also concur with the decision to defend. The dissertation defense consists of a presentation open to the public, followed by a closed session before the student's research advisory committee, plus two additional faculty members external to the department. Committee members indicate their concurrence that the dissertation is complete by signing the dissertation signature page, which is deposited with the final document. Dissertations from previous years can be viewed in the Biomedical Informatics Library.