Vanderbilt’s Joshua Denny, M.D., M.S., associate professor of Biomedical Informatics and Medicine and a recognized leader in the national Precision Medicine Initiative, delivered last week’s Flexner Discovery Lecture.

Vanderbilt University researchers have received two major federal grants — totaling $7.6 million over four years — to support groundbreaking research aimed at making genetic information a routine part of patients’ electronic medical records.

At her recent Flexner Discovery Lecture, Suzanne Bakken, Ph.D., R.N., the Alumni Professor of Nursing and Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University, shares a laugh with Vanderbilt’s William Stead, M.D., left, and Kevin Johnson, M.D., M.S.

In recent years the federal government has used financial incentives and penalties to promote use of electronic health records (EHR), but in these regulations the issue of EHR data interoperability — that is, data standardization — has been left largely unresolved, dimming prospects for data exchange, population health surveillance and systematic improvement across health networks.

Fisk University and Vanderbilt University have begun planning for a novel academic bridge program comprising a three-year accelerated Fisk undergraduate degree, weighted toward courses in natural science, mathematics or computer science, followed by a computer science master’s degree from Fisk, bridging to a Biomedical Informatics Ph.D. from Vanderbilt.

The inaugural Health App Challenge from Vanderbilt University attracted participants from as far away as India, but the winner is an imaging software engineer on campus.

Nancy Lorenzi, Ph.D., assistant vice chancellor for Health Affairs and professor of Biomedical Informatics, has received the Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence, internationally recognized as the capstone award in biomedical informatics.