CHIP Director and UNC Professor Javed Mostafa at a celebration for the CHIP program in 2015.The Carolina Health Informatics Program (CHIP) has received a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-National Library of Medicine (NLM) T15 Biomedical Informatics and Data Science Training grant. Only a handful of U.S. organizations were selected for this highly-competitive and prestigious award, which will provide approximately $3.1 million for doctoral student support, post-doctoral appointments, and short-term summer training for undergraduate students. The grant will serve as a significant resource for CHIP’s recently established PhD in health informatics.
“We are very grateful that we were able to compete for this award before the actual launch and operationalization of our PhD program in the fall of 2016,” said CHIP Director and UNC Professor Javed Mostafa, who is the lead investigator on the T15 grant. “CHIP has already made great strides in improving health data analytics and analytics systems usability through our master’s degree and certificate programs. Research by doctoral students and post-doctoral fellows, guided by CHIP’s world-class, interdisciplinary faculty, will advance this success even further, helping to improve the quality of health care for North Carolina citizens and the world.”
The T15 grant will enable CHIP to offer five years of full-time support to 10 doctoral students and post-doc fellows. Additionally, CHIP will host 18 undergraduates as short-term trainees for eight weeks each summer during the award period. The trainees will have the opportunity to work closely with CHIP faculty members and receive insights into building careers in health informatics.
A truly interdisciplinary program, CHIP draws faculty and expertise from the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS), UNC School of Medicine, Gillings School of Global Pubic Health, UNC School of Nursing, Eshelman School of Pharmacy, UNC School of Dentistry, and Computer Science Department. CHIP also benefits from close partnerships with several area health care organizations and Research Triangle Park-based companies specializing in biopharmaceuticals, heath care, IT, and analytics.
