Research Data Stories: Unique Challenges and Common Goals Working With Data Across Biomedical Disciplines

Researchers face unique challenges throughout the entire data life cycle, depending on their fields and the data types they generate. Join this in-person panel discussion with investigators representing various fields in biomedical research to learn about their unique challenges and practical solutions to successfully overcome and navigate through those challenges.

This panel discussion will be held in Moore Auditorium at the School of Medicine. Refreshments will be provided. Free and open to all, registration is requested.

Presented by Becker Medical Library, Washington University Libraries and the Institute for Informatics, Data Science & Biostatistics (I²DB).

Presenter Bios:

Dr. Abby Cheng is a clinician scientist and Assistant Professor in the Division of Musculoskeletal Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation of the Department of Orthopedic Surgery. She is the Research Director of the WU Living Well Center and the Director of WU physiatry resident research. She is funded by a K23 career development award to investigate the interplay between biopsychosocial factors and musculoskeletal health, including the use of a lifestyle medicine approach to address chronic musculoskeletal pain. She is also the lead principal investigator of an AHRQ U18 award to improve equitable access to Long COVID care in the central Midwest region.

She received her medical degree from Washington University and completed her residency in physical medicine and rehabilitation at Northwestern University, followed by a sports medicine fellowship at Washington University. She also completed a Masters of Population Health Sciences degree at Washington University.

Dr. Malachi Griffith is an Associate Professor of Medicine (Division of Oncology) at Washington University School of Medicine. He has more than 15 years of experience in the fields of genomics, bioinformatics, data mining, and cancer research. His research is focused on improving our understanding of cancer biology and the development of personalized medicine strategies for cancer using genomics and informatics technologies. He develops bioinformatics methods for the analysis of high throughput sequence data and identification of biomarkers for diagnostic, prognostic and drug response prediction. Dr. Griffith’s lab has also made substantial contributions to open-source and open-access resources for cancer research and personalized medicine including the creation of platforms for splice regulatory mutation discovery (regtools.org), mining drug-gene interactions (dgidb.org), the clinical interpretation of variants in cancer (CIViC, civicdb.org, cancervariants.org, opencap.org), and neoantigen characterization (pvactools.org). Recently, the development of algorithms and tools for immunogenomics has become a major focus of his lab.

Dr. Lex Kravitz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis, where he leads a team of researchers that focuses on understanding how the brain mediates feeding and obesity in mice. In addition to a passion for understanding the behavior, his lab has a strong interest in developing open-source hardware devices to study rodent behavior and adopting open science practices for handling data. He is the co-founder of the website OpenBehavior.com, which aims to promote open-source practices for quantifying behavior, and he teaches statistics and coding to neuroscience graduate students. Dr. Kravitz holds a PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania.