Chunhua Weng

Chunhua Weng, Ph.D.

Dr. Chunhua Weng is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics and an investigator of The Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (CTSA) at Columbia University.

Dr. Weng's research has been focused on using biomedical informatics methods to enhance the existing research infrastructure and to accelerate information access and knowledge discovery, especially in electronic health records, for multidisciplinary health science researchers. Her research addresses the socio-technical issues around sharing and reusing fragmented research sources, facilitating collaborations, and streamlining research workflows in busy clinical care settings.

Currently, there are five main research areas in her group:

  • Designing automated semantic alignment methods to improve the accuracy and efficiency of electronic health records-based clinical research recruitment.
  • Designing electronic health records-based phenotyping methods to convert raw clinical data into longitudinal health records optimized to answer questions such as “which diseases are associated with what gene”.
  • Using discarded blood samples from clinical care settings to develop a Columbia University Medical Center biobank that can be used to efficiently address emerging clinical questions, specifically those related to genetic factors that may be responsible for individual susceptibility or resistance to disease and differential response to therapy including adverse outcomes.
  • Using surveys, interviews, and observational studies to investigate the workflows and to understand the unmet information needs of clinical research investigators.
  • Providing research decision support to improve data reuse and seamless collaboration between clinical researchers and front-end clinical care providers.

Keywords:

  • Translational Research Informatics
  • Personalized Medicine
  • Interdisciplinary Team Science
  • Clinical Research Decision Support
  • Workflow
  • Semantic Interoperability
  • Knowledge Representation and Management

Dr. Weng thanks the National Institute of Health, the Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI), CTSA, and Professional Schools Fund of Columbia University for funding her research. She looks forward to working with students interested in the above research areas.

Contact Information:

Chunhua Weng, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Biomedical Informatics
Columbia University

622 West 168 Street, VC, Room-564
New York, NY 10032
Tel: (212) 305-3317
Fax: (212) 305-3302
University email ID: cw2384

Last Updated: 08-25-2009