Indiana Partnership Launches Training Program in Public and Population Health Informatics

The Indianapolis-based Regenstrief Institute has partnered with Indiana University on a new program to train researchers in the fields of public and population health informatics.

With a five-year, $2.5 million award from the National Library of Medicine, Regenstrief is collaborating with Indiana University School of Medicine and IU's Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis to create the Indiana Training Program in Public and Population Health Informatics.

Starting this month it will prepare graduate students and post-doctoral fellows to work in a broad spectrum of entities in the healthcare industry and academia, as well as for local, state and federal public health departments. These trainees will fill a need for informaticians who can design, validate and implement solutions key to the maintenance and improvement of human health.

Regenstrief Institute investigator Brian Dixon, Ph.D., associate professor of epidemiology in the Fairbanks School of Public Health, will co-direct the new program with Regenstrief investigator Titus Schleyer, D.M.D., Ph.D., the Clem McDonald Professor of Biomedical Informatics at IU School of Medicine.

In a prepared statement, Schleyer said that the U.S. healthcare system is trying to learn how to take care of populations, not just patients, and, how to keep people healthy instead of waiting until they get sick. “To achieve both these goals, we need the kind of public and population health informatics researchers and practitioners that our unique program will train.”

Individuals with bachelors or masters degrees in a quantitative science, such as mathematics, statistics, computer science, or informatics, or in a health science, such as public health, genetics, nursing or dentistry, will be considered for the PhD program. Doctoral degrees will be awarded by the Fairbanks School of Public Health.