The Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) today launched a completely new website (www.birncommunity.org) that highlights its broadened focus, including services for the entire biomedical community and enhanced data-sharing and analysis tools and capabilities. The launch represents the first public action since BIRN was re-funded by the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), a unit of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), in early 2009.
The site displays new partnerships with key research organizations in cardiology and primate research, and emphasizes that BIRN offers assistance to biomedical research groups and consortia of all sizes and biomedical research specialties. It also conveys BIRN’s shift to from a hardware-based to a software-based infrastructure that enables users to connect across geographic and/or diverse, incompatible computing systems.
A slide presentation by BIRN co-Principal Investigator (PI) Carl Kesselman, Ph.D., describing the new thrust is available here. Other co-PIs are:
- Ian Foster, Ph.D., a co-father of Grid computing with Kesselman and director of the Computation Institute, a joint project of the University of Chicago (UC) and Argonne National Laboratory;
- Steven G. Potkin, M.D., a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the University of California at Irvine, and leader of the initial Function BIRN testbed to share MRI images recorded at different sites;
- Bruce R. Rosen, M.D., Ph.D., professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and of health sciences and technology at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, as well as leader of the initial Morphometry BIRN testbed to pool and analyze data across neuroimaging sites;
- Jonathan C. Silverstein, M.D., associate director and senior fellow at the Computation Institute; and
- Arthur W. Toga, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Neurology, associate vice provost at the University of California at Los Angeles, and an associate dean of the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine.
Other Executive Committee Members are:
- Michael T. Marron, Ph.D., Director of NCRR’s Division of Biomedical Technology; and
- Liming Yang, Ph.D., health scientist administrator for NCRR’s Division of Biomedical Technology.
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BIRN is a national initiative to advance biomedical research through data sharing and online collaboration. Funded by the National Center for Research Resources, a unit of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), BIRN provides data-sharing infrastructure, software tools, strategies and advisory services to individual biomedical research users and user groups.
BIRN is a collaborative effort between NCRR and a leadership consortium that includes the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI), University of Chicago, Massachusetts General Hospital, University of California at Irvine, and University of California at Los Angeles. Participants represent some of the nation’s premier technical and healthcare research universities, hospitals and other institutions, ranging from small research groups to large, well-established research consortia
