Open Position: Professor or Associate Professor Without Tenure AND Chief Research Information Officer (CRIO)
Position Description
The Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education (BIME) at the University of Washington (UW) is looking for a full-time faculty at the Professor Without Tenure (Job Code 0111) or Associate Professor Without Tenure (Job Code 0112) levels. The new faculty will serve as Chief Research Information Officer (CRIO) and join our current faculty and students in growing both the scholarship and practice/service aspects of our clinical/translational research informatics program. The effort will be distributed across the following areas: ~30% FTE maintaining an independent research program, ~ 60% FTE serving as CRIO for UW Medicine and the Biomedical Informatics Core Director of the UW CTSA and ~10% FTE serving as the Director of the UW Institute for Medical Data Science (established in 2021). This faculty position works closely with eleven other BIME faculty who also engage in scholarship, education in BIME and operation roles within UW Medicine IT Services in areas of clinical informatics, analytics, and clinical/translational research informatics.
The faculty’s research and practice activities will build on existing clinical/translational research informatics scholarship and practice in the context of a) our CTSA (the Institute of Translational Health Sciences), b) our clinical computing operations group (UW Medicine Information Technology Services, UWM ITS), c) the Institute for Medical Data Science, d) the ongoing research and educational programs in the BIME department. Systems at UW that support research IT include: an Epic EHR with multiple modules configured for research, the Epic Cosmos database, a locally developed enterprise data warehouse with 30 years of data on over 5M patients, REDCap, Leaf (a locally developed query tool for research data), the Oncore Clinical Trial Management system and a learning management system. Services offered by RIT include research data service, research computing services, training on the tools, configuring Epic for research, and software solutions development.
The CRIO role is responsible for developing, evolving, and overseeing an organization-wide UW Medicine and CTSA research IT strategy. This position exercises substantial discretion, independent judgment, and decision-making authority in applying the responsibilities called for. Responsibilities are to be carried out at a significantly high level of technical expertise; providing authoritative advice and counsel to the Chief Information Officer as well as UW Medicine research leadership; working with the clinical translational researcher and stakeholder community. The CRIO role provides strategic and tactical leadership and oversees the Director of Research IT (RIT) and the members of the UWM ITS RIT team (~50 staff). Research IT supports a dynamic and expanding portfolio, managing 30-40 grants and approximately 100 active projects at any given time. The CRIO role also serves as the Director of the Biomedical Informatics Core for the UW CTSA (ITHS) which is a subset of the core services offered by RIT team. The CRIO role includes oversight of the budget and personnel in the Research IT group and the ITHS BMI Core. The incumbent will report to the Chair of BIME for scholarship and will dual report to the UW Medicine Vice Dean for Research and the UW Medicine Chief Information Officer for operational work.
The leadership role in the Institute for Medical Data Sciences (IMDS) will focus on leading the development of a 2nd generation strategic plan for the IMDS including fund raising while maintaining and expanding current IMDS activities. The IMDS role will work with the IMDS sponsors, executive committee, and steering committee on development of the strategic plan. The IMDS is housed in BIME administratively, and is a partnership between the School of Medicine, the School of Public Health (Biostatistics and Health Metric Sciences), and the College of Engineering (including the Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering). The current IMDS activities include a seminar series, a journal club, a regional medical data science symposium, a pilot grant award program as well as forums for cross-disciplinary research project development.
University of Washington faculty engage in teaching, research and service. The department is seeking multidisciplinary faculty with backgrounds in foundational and/or applied biomedical informatics research who are interested in scholarship, teaching and practice in a highly collaborative academic setting. We are seeking candidates with an understanding of the needs of the research community as well as what it takes to run an IT service line.
Overall, the position is envisioned as ~60% FTE practice of research informatics and ~40% FTE between grant funded scholarship and the Institute for Medical Data Sciences. Teaching roles are envisioned to include guest lectures and seminars, as well as advising biomedical informatics graduate students and postdocs.
The Department consists of over 25 core faculty and over 50 extended faculty representing 27 departments across the University engaged in a broad range of foundational and applied biomedical informatics research, as well as scholarship and practice activities around medical education. In addition to an active informatics research program, the Department faculty are responsible for the operation, evaluation and refinement of the Biomedical Informatics research training programs (MS, PhD, Postdoc), the joint (with School of Nursing) applied MS in Clinical Informatics and Patient Centered Technologies (CIPCT), and the joint (with the Department of Family Medicine) ACGME accredited clinical informatics fellowship led by BIME. The CIPCT program is a fully on-line program that forms the core of the didactic component of our clinical informatics fellowship. Where appropriate our faculty aim to translate our foundational and applied scholarship into practice at the UW and partner institutions within our operational clinical, analytics and research computing groups. It is expected that new faculty will engage in a similar range of activities including informatics research, teaching, and the practice of research informatics.
The base salary range for this position will be $16,284 to $28,436 per month, commensurate with experience and qualifications, or as mandated by a U.S. Department of Labor prevailing wage determination.
Required Qualifications
- Candidates must have a PhD (or foreign equivalent) in a biomedical informatics or another relevant discipline. An MD (or foreign equivalent) with relevant significant formal biomedical informatics-related training, scholarship, and practice is also acceptable.
- This position is not eligible for visa sponsorship
- Candidates must have a grant funded research portfolio relevant to clinical/translational research informatics. Examples of relevant research areas include one or more of the following (but are not limited to): clinical research informatics, translational research informatics, translational bioinformatics, “big data”, eScience, research information systems (e.g. data warehouses, clinical trial management systems, biorepository systems), database research, data integration, data modeling, data mining/statistics, data visualization, text mining, knowledge representation/ontologies, human computer interaction, data visualization, evaluation of systems, qualitative/field research methodologies.
- Candidates must also have at least 5 years of documented experience with the practice of research informatics (e.g. development, refinement deployment and operation of systems used by clinical translational researchers, such as research data warehouses, clinical trial management systems). This experience should include working across academic, research and operational sides of a health care system and communicating with a wide range of leadership and researchers.
- Candidates must have at least 2 years of documented leadership experience in operational research IT in support of clinical/translational researchers. (e.g. CRIO, e.g. informatics lead of a CTSA informatics core).
Other positive factors for consideration
- Ideally, candidates will have 10 years of demonstrated research IT leadership (e.g. CRIO, e.g. informatics lead of a CTSA informatics core).
- Highly desirable is expertise in biomedical data science, machine learning, biomedical artificial intelligence, and/or large language models and generative AI systems.
- Ideally candidates will demonstrate having led a team to develop and deliver necessary and forward-thinking research IT services.
- Other welcomed attributes include non-informatics research experience, strong computing expertise, and a track record of multidisciplinary collaboration.
- Experience teaching informatics to diverse audiences, including biomedical informatics graduate students and an interest in educational theories are welcomed attributes.
- Experience mentoring and/or teaching MS, PhD and postdoc students in the biomedical informatics domain is a welcomed attribute.
Application Instructions
Interested applicants should submit the following:
- Letter of Intent/Personal Statement – highlighting your interests, background, practical experience and career goals pertaining specifically to your own research goals; research informatics leadership and the CRIO role; and leadership of the Institute for Medical Data Sciences
- Teaching Statement – this should include your teaching interests, experiences and teaching philosophy
- Diversity Statement – this should include your experiences with diversity in training, professional work, previous teaching, and/or in service, and describe your potential to foster diversity in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education and the field.
- Your CV
- List of References – contact information for three reference letter writers
Equal Employment Opportunity Statement
University of Washington is an affirmative action and equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, pregnancy, genetic information, gender identity or expression, age, disability, or protected veteran status.
Benefits Information
A summary of benefits associated with this title/rank can be found at https://hr.uw.edu/benefits/benefits-orientation/benefit-summary-pdfs/. Appointees solely employed and paid directly by a non-UW entity are not UW employees and are not eligible for UW or Washington State employee benefits.
Commitment to Diversity
The University of Washington is committed to building diversity among its faculty, librarian, staff, and student communities, and articulates that commitment in the UW Diversity Blueprint (http://www.washington.edu/diversity/diversity-blueprint/). Additionally, the University’s Faculty Code recognizes faculty efforts in research, teaching and/or service that address diversity and equal opportunity as important contributions to a faculty member’s academic profile and responsibilities (https://www.washington.edu/admin/rules/policies/FCG/FCCH24.html#2432).
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Disability Services
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