Jason H. Moore, PhD, has been named the first permanent director of the Penn Institute for Biomedical Informatics (IBI), at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. His appointment starts March 1, 2015. Moore is an expert in genetics and biomedical informatics, who is currently on faculty at Dartmouth College.

He aims to strengthen and build educational programs, cutting-edge computational infrastructure, and research capacity, with the ultimate goal of creating a distinctive biomedical informatics ecosystem at Penn that can solve the world’s hardest data-driven problems. 

“I look forward to working with Jason to expand this exciting enterprise and bring it to national and international prominence,” says J. Larry Jameson, MD, PhD, Executive Vice President of the University of Pennsylvania for the Health System and Dean of the Perelman School of Medicine. “Because solving many of the most challenging biomedical problems today depends on our ability to integrate, analyze and interpret complex patterns in ‘big data,’ establishment of the institute emerged as a top priority in Penn Medicine’s strategic plan. Under Jason’s leadership, I expect the institute will become a model of education, innovation and collaborative research at the interface of biomedical informatics, the basic sciences, and the clinical sciences.”

With support from the naming gift of the Smilow Center for Translational Research, the IBI was established in 2013 to launch initiatives in the broad field of biomedical informatics. John Hogenesch, PhD, professor of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics, served as the IBI interim director, and John Holmes, PhD, associate professor of Medical Informatics in Epidemiology, served as an IBI associate director. 

Moore is the founding Director of the Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Sciences at Dartmouth College, where he also holds an endowed chair and is professor of Genetics and professor of Community and Family Medicine in the Geisel School of Medicine. Before joining the Dartmouth faculty in 2004, Moore was an Ingram Associate Professor of Cancer Research and a member of the Center for Human Genetics Research at Vanderbilt University. 

The primary focus of his translational bioinformatics research program at Dartmouth is to develop, evaluate and apply novel computational and statistical algorithms for identifying combinations of DNA sequence variations along with combinations of environmental factors that are predictive of common disease endpoints. For over a decade, his lab has developed one of the first new methodologies and open-source software packages designed specifically for detecting and characterizing gene-gene and gene-environment interactions.  Moore earned his doctorate in Human Genetics from the University of Michigan.

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