The development of iSMART, or Intelligent Social Risk Management in Alzheimer’s disease/Alzheimer’s disease-related dementia Patients, is led by principal investigators Serena Jingchuan Guo, M.D. Ph.D., an assistant professor of pharmaceutical outcomes and policy in the UF College of Pharmacy; Jiang Bian, Ph.D., a professor and division director of biomedical informatics in the UF College of Medicine Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics and chief data scientist/chief research information officer at UF Health; and Ramzi Salloum, Ph.D., a professor and director of the Division of Implementation Science and Health Interventions in the UF College of Medicine. The National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Aging awarded the team $3 million for this R01 project.

But a new five-year, $3 million research project funded by the NIH’s National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences aims to create a digital dictionary and playbook to help technology replicate the way humans experience disease. The study is connected to a $1.75-million project at UF to create Florida’s Digital Twin, a digital replica of Florida that can model the effects of natural disasters and future health threats.

“This grant is important for our research team because it helps us develop new methods and ways to manage big data. It significantly enhances our ability to understand the complexity of how environmental factors affect human health,” said project director Jiang Bian, Ph.D., a professor in the UF College of Medicine’s Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics. The project’s scope is notable for integrating social determinants of health, such as education and economic status, with ecological factors, such as pollution and natural disasters.

Jiang Bian, Ph.D., has been named UF Health chief data scientist, with a goal of aiding researchers as they move into a new frontier of using biomedical informatics to improve health care policy and practice.

Bian will develop and support data scientists across data types and diseases, help improve research infrastructure, and expand data science and translational science research endeavors. He will also work to develop a hub for computational health sciences with other stakeholders to advance data science and artificial intelligence research.

Bian, who will also remain professor and director of cancer informatics and Ehealth core with the UF College of Medicine health outcomes and biomedical informatics department, will report to Gigi Lipori, M.T., M.B.A., UF Health chief information officer and senior vice president.

“The chief data scientist is a new leadership role for the academic health center as we face exciting growth and investments in data applications, biomedical informatics and new technologies,” Lipori said. “Dr. Bian will provide strategic vision and leadership in partnership with our teams and leaders including the chief medical information officer, chief research information officer and others.”