School Focus Areas

Clinical Informatics

Healthcare is increasingly dependent on timely and accurate communication and the processing of data. Therefore, there is a need for practitioners and scientists in health informatics, which is the field that deals with information processing methods and applications in health sciences and biomedicine.

Clinical Informatics is a multidisciplinary field which focuses on information problems in healthcare and draws upon computer science, psychology, decision science, and basic biological science, among others. Informaticians are therefore uniquely prepared to apply a wide variety of methods to improve patient care.

Healthcare and biomedicine have both benefited and suffered from information overload. Information processing is central to clinical work. Clinicians gather general knowledge about the world and collect specific information about their patients. They then apply the general knowledge to the specific patient in order to make clinical decisions. Finally, they implement these decisions. Better information, therefore, will lead to better care. In general, clinical informatics is concerned with helping clinicians of all types leverage information to improve care.

Cognitive Informatics

Cognitive informatics and decision making is a multidisciplinary area that is devoted to the study of medical decision making, cognitive foundations of health behaviors, and the effective use of computer-based information technologies in healthcare. Our research is deeply rooted in theories and methods of cognitive science, with a strong focus on the analysis of medical error, development of models of decision making, and design and evaluation of effective human-computer interactions. These studies are guided by a concern for improving the performance of individuals and teams in the healthcare system.

The program is designed to respond to the urgent and long-term cognitive challenges in health information technology adoption and meaningful use. Our mission is to conduct basic, translational, and applied research in medical decision making and cognition and develop cognitive support tools for clinicians and patients. Our research in cognitive informatics applies components of cognitive psychology, computer science, artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy, and neuroscience to study individual and team cognition in a real-world complex environment. Our vision is to become a national resource center providing strategic leadership in research and applications for patient-centered cognitive support in healthcare.

Computational Biomedicine

As biomedicine increasingly becomes an information-intensive discipline, the application of computational methods is not only indispensable to the management, understanding, and presentation of biologic data of all types, but also is interwoven into the fabric of the field as a whole.

Understanding biomedical systems requires the integration of information from the level of molecules and genes to the level of organismic behavior. At each of these levels there has been an explosion of information generated. Computer science provides a unifying framework allowing for a principled understanding of the underlying mechanisms both within and across levels.

Learning and Technology

Learning with technology is at the core of the research efforts where several pressing research problems remain to be addressed.

These include:

  • the application of learning theory and evidence to the design of technology-based learning environments
  • the measurement of learning as it applies to technology in education
  • research and evaluation to compare effectiveness of various approaches and/or technology-based applications
  • understanding how learning integrates with distributed cognition and just-in-time learning tools
  • research in technology aided health communication.


This program will prepare you to meet the demands of emerging careers at the intersection of healthcare, education, and communication. Potential careers include the design, development, evaluation and/or research of a range of products and tools including: health professional training programs, patient education materials, decisions support programs, educational games and interactive software, just-in-time learning and communication applications, telehealth and remote learning tools, and distributed cognition devices.