BMI welcomes new Faculty

SCI’s Department of Biomedical Informatics (BMI) in partnership with the University of Arizona, is pleased to welcome four recently hired faculty members to the program. 

Doug Fridsma, M.D., Ph.D., will join BMI as an associate professor in early November. Fridsma has previously served as faculty at the Center for Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh where he taught courses on clinical environments, modeling of complex biological systems and organizational theory. He did his medical training at the University of Michigan and went on to complete his residency and Ph.D. at Stanford University. Most recently, Fridsma worked as a primary architect on the BRIDG project, a National Cancer Institute (NCI) funded initiative that is part of the Cancer Bioinformatics Grid (caBIG) program and the aim of which is to develop a comprehensive formal representation of the shared semantics of clinical trials research. 

Trevor Cohen, M.D., Ph.D., joined BMI as an assistant professor in August. He received his medical degree from the University of Cape Town in South Africa, and his doctorate in biomedical informatics from Columbia University in 2007, working with Dr. Vimla Patel. Cohen’s work focuses on Latent Semantic Analysis and expert cognition in the clinical domain of psychiatry.

Valentin Dinu, Ph.D.,also joined BMI as an assistant professor in August. Dinu graduated Magna Cum Laude with Highest Honors from Harvard University with dual degrees in physics and mathematics. He completed his doctoral degree at Yale University in computational biology and bioinformatics, with a focus on Translational Research Informatics, under the direction of Dr. Perry Miller in 2007.

Kanav Kahol, Ph.D., joined BMI as an assistant professor in September. Kahol graduated from ASU's Department of Computer Science and Engineering with Dr. Panchanathan in the area of haptics in 2006. He has been an assistant research professor in SCI and a member of the research faculty at the Simulation and Training Center at Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center.

BMI will celebrate the official grand opening of the new $29.6 million Arizona Biomedical Collaborative (ABC) Building 1 on Oct. 15. ABC 1 is the first shared ASU/U of A research facility and is on the emerging Phoenix Biomedical Campus. ASU informatics researchers share the building with Basic Medical Science researchers from the U of A College of Medicine- Phoenix.