Prominent Researcher Appointed New Chair of Biomedical Informatics

The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, has appointed Lang Li as the new chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at The Ohio State University College of Medicine.

In addition, Dr. Li will serve as the Program Director for the Informatics Program at The Ohio State Center for Clinical and Translational Science (CCTS). This will involve working on programmatic goals and visions, as well as integrating and collaborating across the CCTS programs.

Dr. Li was formerly the T.K. Li Endowed Chair in Medical Research at Indiana School of Medicine, where he served as director of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and associate director of the Indiana Institute of Personalized Medicine.

“We’re excited to welcome Dr. Li to the College of Medicine. He’s a world-class researcher whose experience and leadership will continue to advance the Department of Biomedical Informatics,” said Dr. Craig Kent, dean of the Ohio State College of Medicine and vice president of Health Sciences at Ohio State’s Wexner Medical Center.

Following his doctoral work at the University of Michigan, Li served as faculty at Indiana University since 2001. During this time, he developed an international reputation for the use of biomedical informatics and systems pharmacology to evaluate drug efficacies and adverse drug events. Taking advantage of various large-scale biomedical data sources, he and his team successfully discovered and validated epidemiological and pharmacological data for drug interactions.

Li’s translational research has been extensively funded by awards from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. He currently serves as investigator, co-investigator or mentor on 12 research awards totaling more than $2 million a year, and is the author of more than 175 manuscripts.

Beyond his research and leadership experience, Li is actively involved in education and mentoring. In his role as director of the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, he has led a group of 29 faculty focused on promoting advanced computation and informatics approaches as applied to normal and disease-associated biological processes.

The Ohio State University Department of Biomedical Informatics is home to a rapidly expanding program of basic and applied biomedical informatics innovation, catalyzed by a wealth of driving biological and clinical problems generated by the comprehensive basic science and clinical units that make up the Ohio State Wexner Medical Center and College of Medicine.

The Ohio State University Center for Clinical and Translational Science (CCTS) is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) program (UL1TR001070, KL2TR001068, TL1TR001069) The CTSA program is led by the NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS).