Bian appointed to National Academies committee

Jiang Bian, PhD
Jiang Bian, Ph.D.

HOBI associate professor Jiang Bian, Ph.D., was invited to join an ad hoc committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) this spring. The 15-member Accelerating Behavioral Science through Ontology Development and Use committee will spend more than a year gathering, reviewing and discussing the literature on the development of ontologies in scientific disciplines to aid in the development of ontologies in the behavioral sciences.

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Ontologies are methods of classifying and cataloguing large quantities of data or knowledge systems using agreed-upon labels and definitions with the goal of making it easy to store, access, retrieve, use and analyze the information. Biomedical ontologies are widely used as artifacts to represent, manage, and share biomedical knowledge, and to support downstream applications such as data cataloging and data integration.

Bian, a researcher in HOBI’s biomedical informatics division, has a strong, diverse multi-disciplinary background in data integration, semantic web, machine learning, natural language processing, social media analysis, network science, data privacy, and software engineering. His expertise and background serve an overarching theme: data science with heterogeneous data, information and knowledge resources.

Bian also directs the Cancer Informatics & eHealth Core program at the UF Health Cancer Center. The eHealth Core program is jointly supported by the UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute.

Bian’s service on the committee continues through May 2022.