Informatics for Precision Health and Wellness: Challenges and Opportunities

Please join us at Hardy Coffee in Benson for a presentation on “Informatics for Precision Health and Wellness: Challenges and Opportunities” by Dr. Kate Cooper. Coffee and refreshments will be provided, beginning at 5:00pm. Please RSVP so we can plan accordingly.

Schedule:
Networking 5:00-5:30pm
Workshop 5:30-6:30pm

“Informatics for Precision Health and Wellness: Challenges and Opportunities”
In October 2014, the current NIH Associate Director for Data Science, Dr. Philip Bourne, spoke about the expanding challenge of biomedical research analyses, saying "the health of each one of us is a big data problem." Indeed, the limits of health data collection on any one individual have no bounds, from standard data collection (routine lab checks, diagnostic tests, electronic health records) to newer and less common technologies (personal genotypic profiling, lifestyle monitors, social networking). Further, individuals can now more actively pursue good health - in a broader focus on what one may call precision wellness - via wearable technology, direct-to-consumer testing, and apps designed to track or measure day to day activity, intake, stress, etc. However, as the scale and dimensionality of this data grows, so grows the need for robust, informative and reproducible methods for analysis of individual health and wellness data. In this talk, I will discuss current challenges surrounding precision health and wellness for the individual, and present opportunities for how these challenges may be solved with machine learning based approaches.

Bio
Kate Cooper earned her PhD in Pathology and Microbiology from the University of Nebraska Medical Center in 2012, and she has been an Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Informatics at the University of Nebraska at Omaha since 2015. Kate’s background is in bioinformatics with specialization in the use network-based analysis of biomedical data, with interests in expanding these approaches to studies in chronic disease, nutrition informatics, and public health. Kate has been a member of the UNO Bioinformatics research group since 2005 and has found success collaborating on a number of disease-related biomedical research projects including but not limited to antibiotic resistance, whooping cough, Chikungunya virus, and aging in M. musculus and C. elegans.