CCI assistant professor receives $535,000 career development award

May 13, 2016
Categories: Research Tags: Awards and honors, College of Computing and Informatics, Research

Lixia Yao, an assistant professor in the College of Computing and Informatics Department of Software and Information Systems, has received a Career Development Award in Biomedical Informatics from the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health.

This highly competitive award is designed to provide junior faculty the support and “protected time” for an intensive career development in biomedical informatics leading to research independence.

The three-year award, which totals $535,446, will fund Yao’s systematical investigation into resource allocation in biomedical research and further development of her novel tool, the health research opportunity index (ROI).

“This research idea is based on a completely out-of-box thinking of resource allocation in biomedicine from the perspective of a data scientist.” said Yao. “I am truly excited to see that the National Library of Medicine has selected it for funding. I welcome talented students at UNC Charlotte to participate in this innovative project. We will refine and expand the current ROI model and make it useful to various stakeholders in biomedical research in the next three years.”

ROI is a quantitative measure of disparities between resources dedicated to a disease and its relative burden on society. It is designed to provide an unbiased, data-driven framework to help scientific, investment and political communities assess resource investment and identify unmet medical needs. Her early work on developing ROI was published in the August issue of Nature Biotechnology in 2015.

Yao completed a Ph.D. in Biomedical Informatics from Columbia University in 2010. She then worked as a principal investigator at GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals prior to joining UNC Charlotte in 2013. She now leads a team of data scientists and health care professionals at the Health Informatics Lab and collaborates with world-class scholars and clinicians. Her research focuses on mining, integrating and transforming unstructured, incomplete and “noisy” data (i.e., electronic health records and claims databases, literature, patents and social media) into meaningful biomedical knowledge and health care IT applications.

Read more about Yao’ health ROI research here.