As part of a reorganization of its intramural research activities, the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) has launched a search for a scientific director. The scientific director will oversee a group of 150 scientific personnel, developing new approaches to data science, biomedical informatics, and computational biology.
In a blog post on the library’s website, director Patti Brennan, R.N., Ph.D., called the move a big step in revving up its intramural research operation.
One of the 27 Institutes and Centers of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), NLM creates and hosts major digital resources, tools, and services for biomedical and health literature, data, and standards, sending 115 terabytes of data to five million users and receiving 15 terabytes of data from 3,000 users every weekday.
NLM’s strategic plan for 2017-2027 positions it to become a platform for biomedical discovery and data-powered health. NLM anticipates continued expansion of its intramural research program to keep pace with growing demand for innovative data science and informatics approaches that can be applied to biomedical research and health and growing interest in data science across the NIH.
A Blue Ribbon Panel recently reviewed NLM’s intramural research programs and recommended, among other things, unifying the programs under a single scientific director. That shift also aligns the library with NIH’s other institutes and centers, most of which are guided by one scientific director.
NLM’s intramural research program includes activities housed in both the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications (LHC) and the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). The researchers in these two centers develop and apply computational approaches to a broad range of problems in biomedicine, molecular biology, and health, but LHC focuses on medical and clinical data, while NCBI focuses on biological and genomic data.
But the Blue Ribbon Panel noted that the boundaries between clinical and biological data are dissolving, and the analytical and computational strategies for each are increasingly shared. “As a result, the current research environment calls for a more holistic view of biomedical data, one best served by shared approaches and ongoing collaborations while preserving the two centers’ unique identities, wrote Brennan, who came to NIH in 2016 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the Lillian L. Moehlman Bascom Professor at the School of Nursing and College of Engineering.
She added that having a single scientific director should lead to a sharper focus on research priorities, fewer barriers to collaboration, the cross-fertilization of ideas and the optimization of scarce resources.
The new scientific director will be asked to craft a long-range plan that identifies research areas where the NLM can best leverage its unique position and resources. We’ll also look for ways to allocate more resources to fundamental research while streamlining operational support. “Down the road, we’ll expand our research agenda to include high-risk, high-reward endeavors, the kinds of things that raise profound questions and have the potential to yield tremendous impact,” she wrote.
Besides the scientific director, the NLM is also recruiting three investigators to complement its strengths in machine learning and natural language processing.
