Members of the McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics Community have recently achieved noteworthy accomplishments. We want to recognize and applaud these individuals.

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  McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics is playing a key role in UTHealth Houston's new collaboration that will give students, faculty, and staff access to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Education tool. Visit our news webpage to learn more.
• PhD Candidate Yiming Li & Alumna Xu Zuo, PhD '24 co-authored a JAMIA article that was recently published.

• Professor Xiaobo Zhou, PhD and his team earned a new grant from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) titled “Optimizing mRNA sequences with deep neural networks.” The total budget is $1,404,000 and the project will run through July of 2028.

• Yejin Kim, PhD, assistant professor at McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics, has earned a new grant from the National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Aging. The grant is worth over $3.8 million and the goal for the project is to speed up clinical trials by informing the design of future intervention trials for Alzheimer’s Disease.

• Professor Zhongming Zhao, PhD, MS has been awarded $2 million from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) to continue advancing the state of Texas’ fight against cancer. Click here to learn more.

• The Department of Bioinformatics and Systems Medicine Chair, Degui Zhi, PhD, recently earned a National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Aging grant worth over $3.7 million. The project goal is to make publicly available tools that facilitate novel discoveries that improve our understanding on the genetic architecture of Alzheimer’s Disease and related brain imaging data.

We invite the entire McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics Community of faculty, staff, and students to attend the inaugural McWilliams Day on Wednesday, October 23. During this special event, we will celebrate the transformational gift given to our school by D. Bradley McWilliams last year.

The event will begin at 10 AM and will be hosted in our building/space (7000 Fannin Street, Suite 600 Houston, Texas 77030). Please RSVP by the October 18th deadline at go.uth.edu/McWilliamsDay.

The Gaining Equity in Training for Public Health Informatics and Technology (GET PHIT) program is accepting applications for Spring 2025 Internships.

GET PHIT is now accepting applications for the Spring 2025 Paid Internship Program. Students with strong interest in public health informatics and technology are encouraged to apply. The GET PHIT internship is a 160-hour part-time paid internship relevant to public health informatics. Students will receive a stipend ranging from $2,440 - $3,000 based on education and skill. Practicum credit for the internship is also an option for eligible students.

The deadline for students to apply is Oct. 1, 2024. For program requirements and the application, visit https://www.uth.edu/get-phit/internship.htm. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to email [email protected].

We want to remind all McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics students that they must have a reservation to use any conference room in our building/space. Additionally, all cubicles are assigned to certain students and/or staff. Students cannot occupy a cubicle or conference room without prior approval. Conference room scheduling and doctoral student cubicle requests should be sent to: [email protected]. Additionally, students can also reserve rooms (including study spaces, conference rooms, and classrooms) at the TMC Library. Visit this webpage to learn about the requirements and/or make a reservation.

Join us from 5:30 to 8:00 PM (PST) on Monday, November 11 for the McWilliams AMIA24 Mixer. We will host the annual event at Johnny Foley's Irish House (243 O'Farrell St, San Francisco, CA).

Click here to RSVP for the event! We hope you can join us.

• Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Chair Xiaoqian Jiang, PhD, was mentioned in a Fierce Healthcare article about the collaboration of UTHealth Houston and OpenAI to build a HIPAA-compliant algorithm for medical training at the patient's bedside.
• Dr. Jiang was also featured in a Becker’s Health IT article recently where he explained the new collaboration.