Constantin Aliferis, MD, MS, PhD, FACMI, will provide leadership for CTSI's Biomedical Informatics core and the Institute for Health Informatics, assuming responsibilities from Dean Connie Delaney, PhD, RN, FAAN, FACMI, who served in these roles on an interim basis.
For the last seven years, Dr. Aliferis served as the founding director of the Center for Health Informatics and Bioinformatics at NYU Langone Medical Center (NYULMC). At NYU, he also led the CTSI Informatics program and the Informatics Shared Resource of the NYU Cancer Institute.
His work over the years spanned cancer genomics, proteomics, microbiomics and contributed to discoveries in treatment and prevention of diverse diseases like pneumonia, lung cancer, melanoma, psoriasis, osteoarthritis, stroke, rheumatoid arthritis, and more.
Over the last 25 years, Dr. Aliferis has invented many algorithmic methods for causal and predictive discoveries - for determining how and why we develop health problems, and predicting when and to whom they will occur in the future.
His algorithms have the capacity for analyzing millions of variables at once to pinpoint genetic biomarkers, identify drug targets, and construct molecular profiles crucial for the development of personalized medicine.
At the University of Minnesota, Dr. Aliferis will work to build a leading health informatics and translational biomedical informatics program. His work will play a critical role in driving the use of health data as a tool for scientific research and, ultimately, to deliver higher quality, more efficient care to patients.
"It's a truly transformative time for informatics," Dr. Aliferis said. "With big data and informatics tools, we have the opportunity to affect change and greatly improve the health care system."