The main motivation for starting this blog was to share our enthusiasm about the increased importance of data and data analysis in science, industry, and society in general. Based on recent initiatives, such as BD2k, it is clear that the NIH is also enthusiastic and very much interested in supporting data science. For those that don’t know, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world. This federal agency has an annual budget of about $30 billion.
The NIH has several institutes, each with its own budget and capability to guide funding decisions. Currently, the missions of most of these institutes relate to a specific disease or public health challenge. Many of them fund research in statistics and computing because these topics are important components of achieving their specific mission. Currently, however, there is no institute directly tasked with supporting data science per se. This is about to change.
The National Library of Medicine (NLM) is one of the few NIH institutes that is not focused on a particular disease or public health challenge. Apart from the important task of maintaining an actual library, it supports, among many other initiatives, indispensable databases such as PubMed, GeneBank and GEO. After over 30 years of successful service as NLM director, Dr. Donald Lindberg stepped down this year and, as is customary, an advisory board was formed to advice the NIH on what’s next for NLM. One of the main recommendations of the report is the following:
NLM should be the intellectual and programmatic epicenter for data science at NIH and stimulate its advancement throughout biomedical research and application.
Data science features prominently throughout the report making it clear the NIH is very much interested in further supporting this field. The next director can therefore have an enormous influence in the futre of data science. So, if you love data, have administrative experience, and a vision about the future of data science as it relates to the medical and related sciences, consider this exciting opportunity.
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