Core Faculty of the Training Program

Harry Hochheiser, PhD

Harry Hochheiser, PhD

Training Program Director and Associate Professor

Dr. Hochheiser is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Director, Biomedical Informatics Training Program. His research interests are focused on the design of usable systems for use in clinical and research settings. He is particularly interested in using user-centered design techniques to inform the design of highly-interactive information visualization systems for the interpretation of complex data sets in domains such as bioinformatics and electronic health records.

The core faculty of the Biomedical Informatics Training Program includes faculty from the Department of Biomedical Informatics, as well as faculty from other departments and schools within the University of Pittsburgh.

Michael J. Becich, MD, PhD

Michael J. Becich, MD, PhD

Professor and Chairman

Dr. Becich is Professor and inaugural Chairman of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He is jointly appointed in Pathology, Information Sciences/Telecommunications and Clinical/Translational Research. He is Associate Director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute as well as the Clinical and Translational Science Institute at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Dr. Becich’s research interests are focused on the interface between clinical informatics and bioinformatics. His research is funded by the CDC, NCATS, NCI, NHLBI and NLM and includes clinical phenotyping of patients for genomic/personalized medicine, tissue banking informatics, clinical informatics and bioinformatics with a special emphasis on data sharing. Dr. Becich is interested in transforming clinical care through translational research and creating a learning health system focused on cost effective, high quality and safe care through personalized medicine.

David Boone, PhD

David Boone, PhD

Assistant Professor

Dr. Boone is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics. His research interests include development and implementation of STEM outreach programs, breast cancer biology, transcription and transcriptomics, regulation and function of long noncoding RNAs, and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1) signaling in breast cancer.

Vanathi Gopalakrishnan, PhD

Vanathi Gopalakrishnan, PhD

Associate Professor

Dr. Gopalakrishnan is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Intelligent Systems Program, and Computational and Systesm Biology. Dr. Gopalakrishnan is interested in the development of intelligent computational aids for solving clinically relevant biological problems, such as biomarker discovery for neurodegenerative diseases from proteomic mass spectra, macromolecular crystallization, functional MRI data analysis and mapping of protein sequence-structure-function relationships. Her research encompasses the application of machine learning methods such as rule learning and Bayesian techniques, in addition to developing quantitative models of biological phenomena from first principles. Dr. Gopalakrishnan teaches a core course titled Introduction to Bioinformatics (BIOINF 2051) each fall term, oversees the Bioinformatics Journal Club, and each summer offers a directed study laboratory course (BIOINF 2053) in conjunction with educators from the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.

Hatice Osmanbeyoglu, PhD

Hatice Osmanbeyoglu, PhD

Assistant Professor

Dr. Osmanbeyoglu is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics, School of Medicine.  Her research include developing integrative statistical and machine learning approaches for extracting therapeutic insight from highly heterogenous omic datasets, clinical and drug response data for the purpose of precision medicine. Projects are in the areas of cancer genomics, epigenetics of drug response, and immunotherapy and are executed through multi-disciplinary collaborations.