Message From the Dean

The School of Health Information Sciences is a very non-traditional place where excellence in research, education and service is pursued and the future leaders of Health Informatics are trained. This is the first program of its kind in the State of Texas and the only school of its kind in the Western hemisphere. The varied and talented cadre of professionals at our school represents expertise both in the theory and practice of informatics applied to biomedical science and health care. You’ll find our performance based, highly interdisciplinary, team-oriented education and research programs both stimulating, challenging and career enhancing.

The Certificate program and the Masters and Doctoral degree programs are offered in the unique environment of the Texas Medical Center, the most concentrated area of biomedical and healthcare expertise, knowledge and skills on the planet. There are outstanding opportunities for students to be involved in informatics applied to health care and biomedical research in the many clinical and research components of The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and the more than forty other healthcare related entities in the Texas Medical Center. These opportunities are unmatched anywhere else. You will interact with highly qualified and experienced faculty active in research and applications in a wide array of Health Informatics problems.  Through such research consortia and centers as the Gulf Coast Consortia for Structural and Computational Biology, Center for Computational Biomedicine, Center for Biosecurity and Public Health Informatics Research, Institute for Molecular Medicine for the Prevention of Human Diseases, NASA/Johnson Space Center you will interact  with the best and brightest on the frontiers of human experience. As a Certificate student you will learn the basic health informatics skills that will help you integrate informatics in your primary profession. As a Masters Degree student you will learn to apply our most advanced understanding of healthcare and biomedical knowledge to improve biomedical discovery and the delivery of healthcare. As a Doctoral student you will work with leading researchers in a broad array of Health and Biomedical Informatics areas to advance the state-of-the-art and open up new areas of inquiry for future generations.

Students and faculty in our programs come from numerous health professions, basic sciences, biomedical sciences, social sciences, cognitive sciences, engineering, bioengineering, and computer science backgrounds. The “transdisciplinary” nature of our educational and research programs makes them unique, rewarding and is resulting in breakthrough discoveries. Our faculty and students are making groundbreaking contributions to healthcare, biomedical discovery and educational research. This includes inventing and evaluating new ways to capture, store, access, and evaluate healthcare and biomedical research knowledge and information. Advances in computational biomedicine, pioneered at our school, are revolutionizing the study of the molecular basis of normal and abnormal biological processes as well as discovering the meaning of genomic and proteomics data, the structural and functional basis of the molecular machinery of the cell. We are exploring the relationships between brain function and structure, improving biosecurity, understanding human-computer interaction, inventing new nanotechnology, and changing space medicine. We are also innovative in the use of educational research and technology, revolutionizing how we design and implement online educational and learning environments for both biomedical scientists and healthcare professionals.

Are you up to the challenge? Then join us, become the informatics leaders of tomorrow, and help us invent the future of health care and biomedical discovery.

Jack W. Smith, MD, PhD
Professor, Dean