Welcome to BIME
Welcome to the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education.
Our vision is to unleash the potential for information to improve biomedicine, health and medical education. We do this via a three-pronged approach leveraging the bidirectional synergies between a) basic and applied research, b) training the next generation of researchers and practitioners, and c) applying our expertise to the broader operations of UW Medicine including research, clinical care and medical education through the practice of Biomedical Informatics and the practice of Medical Education and Evaluation. See our News and Events page for current activities.
Cordially,
Peter Tarczy-Hornoch, MD
Chair and Professor, Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education
News Highlights
BIME Welcomes New Chief Research Information Officer
The University of Washington is delighted to announce Dr. Shawn Murphy, MD, PhD will be joining the University of Washington as a core faculty in Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education with a joint appointment in Neurology. In addition to being a core BIME faculty member and attending in an outpatient neurology clinic, he will be serving as UW Medicine Chief Research Information Officer in IT Services, informatics lead of the Institute for Translational Health Sciences (ITHS) Data Science Core, and the Director of the Institute for Medical Data Sciences (IMDS).
“I am honored and excited to join the Data Science workforce at the University of Washington. I have always admired the closeness UW students have to the top teachers in the tech industry. I am hoping to enable Clinical and Informatics Research to use this and take Data Science and AI to a new level at UW,” said Dr. Murphy.
Dr. Murphy is currently the Chief Research Information Officer at Mass General Brigham and a Professor of Neurology. Over the past 30 years, he has been an integral leader and innovator in supporting research data and technology there. He is the creator of the Research Patient Data Registry (RPDR) and co-founded i2b2 (used in > 300 sites globally) enabling scalable, audit-ready clinical data access for the research community nationally and internationally. Shawn has also been a leading scientific collaborator and principal investigator on numerous multi-institutional NIH grants, including RECOVER, eMerge, ACT, AoU, PCORI, SHRINE and other major award programs that helped elevate MGB into a leader in translational informatics. His work has shaped standards for privacy-preserving data sharing, cohort discovery tools, and clinical data harmonization, influencing research data operations across Mass General Brigham hospitals and enabling thousands of studies per year.
“We are delighted to have Dr. Murphy join UW, bringing decades of expertise in informatics and data science research and operational work around instrumenting the health care enterprise for discovery in the course of clinical care,” said Dr. Peter Tarczy-Hornoch, Chair of BIME and Interim Director for IMDS.
“ITHS welcomes Dr. Murphy to this crucial role. He is exactly the right person to take on the new informatics challenges of clinical and translational research,” said Dr. John Amory, Principal Investigator of ITHS and Associate Dean of Translational Sciences.
Dr. Murphy will be bringing this rich and deep expertise to his UW roles as BIME faculty, Neurology faculty, UW Medicine CRIO, ITHS informatics lead and Institute for Medical Data Science Director.
“I am excited to welcome Dr. Murphy to UW Medicine and confident that his decades of leadership in research informatics at Mass General Brigham will significantly advance our research, data science, and innovation efforts,” said Eric Neil, UW Medicine Chief Information Officer.
Dr. Murphy’s position begins effective February 1, 2026.