San Diego Biomedical Informatics Education & Research (SABER)

Abstract The San Diego Biomedical Informatics Education & Research (SABER) training program was awarded an NLM training grant in the summer of 2012 and renewed in 2017. In this renewal proposal, we describe our accomplishments for the past 8.75 years and our vision for the next five years. The SABER training program includes core faculty from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) Health Department of Biomedical Informatics, as well as multiple faculty across UCSD. Since the start of this program in 2012, we have hosted 78 long- and short-term trainees. Our pre-doctoral trainees enroll in competitive doctoral programs in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology (BISB), Computer Science, Cognitive Science, or Biomedical Sciences. Trainees complete a foundational curriculum in biomedical informatics (BMI), taught by our core faculty, in addition to core curricula from their respective degree programs. All of our trainees have been meeting their academic milestones and 11 have graduated. Our post- doctoral trainees enroll in a master’s program (Computer Science or Advanced Sciences), in addition to completing our foundational BMI curriculum. These trainees are embedded in projects at the medical center that help them contextualize the research methods they learn through coursework. All of our short-term trainees are under-represented minorities in science and participate in various research projects leading to presentations and publications. Most trainees who completed our BMI training have research positions in industry and academia— a few are continuing their training, two are employed in non-profit organizations, and several became assistant professors at various institutions (Carnegie Mellon, UCLA, UCSF, UCSD, Vanderbilt, etc.). Some highlights of our training in the past five years have been the high productivity of our trainees, who are pursuing innovative research in a wide spectrum of informatics areas of specialization, from translational bioinformatics to clinical research informatics to healthcare informatics. Additionally, the proportion of women (57%) and under-represented minorities (49%) is high in our overall trainee pool. We have filled all of our slots each year with highly qualified candidates from diverse educational and cultural backgrounds, who have already produced first-author publications in high impact journals (e.g., Cell, Science, JAMIA, PNAS) and conferences.