PRIMARY MENTOR:

Tracy L. Webb, DVM, PhD, is a Research Scientist III in the Department of Clinical Sciences

and Clinical Review Board Specialist in the Office of the Vice President of Research at CSU.

Tracy L. Webb is engaged in a variety of collaborative immunology-based research projects, advancement of veterinary clinical research to strengthen veterinary and translational applications, and One Health initiatives particularly as Chair of the COHA Communication and Collaboration subcommittee and advocacy for naturally occurring animal disease models as a means of improving health outcomes across species.

MENTOR TEAM:

Sue VandeWoude, DVM, DACLAM. University Distinguished Professor in Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Pathology at CSU and has been PI on COHA funded awards in One Health Datasets.

Melissa Haendel, PhD. Professor and Chief Research Informatics Officer, Marsico Chair in DataScience, at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. She is director of the Translational and Integrative Science Laboratory (Tislab, https://tislab.org), which develops semantic engineering methods that allow data integration and inference of new knowledge across disciplines and heterogeneous data. Research by the Tislab is used for rare disease diagnostics, implementation of platforms and tools for translational research, and open and reproducible science to help weave together healthcare, basic research, and patient engagement to make science go faster, better, together.

DESCRIPTION OF POTENTIAL RESEARCH PROJECTS:

The fellow will receive training in data science, medical informatics, and electronic medical record (EMR) data management at CSU and University of Colorado Denver Anschutz Medical Campus Translational and Integration Science Laboratory. Research projects will facilitate translation of veterinary EMR into common data models, and pilot projects demonstrating comparisons of human and veterinary medical conditions using EMR data analyses.

Examples of potential projects include ontologic classification of veterinary medical record diagnoses and codes, assessment of paired client-patient record retrievals from veterinary and human EMR, and pairing of analytic data with clinical records. Specific projects will cater to applicant strengths with a variety of current areas of interest under discussion, from environmental exposure effects to trauma, inflammatory bowel disease, diabetes, cancer, and others. 

ADDITIONAL TRAINING OPPORTUNITIES:

The trainee will have the unique opportunity to work closely with experts in bioinformatics, comparative genomics, medical informatics, and translational informatics, data semantics, and heterogeneous data integration. Colorado Clinical Translational Science Institute training opportunities, national and regional conferences, and involvement in a multi-year COHA initiative on ‘One Health Datasets’ will afford unique opportunities and excellent potential for career development in a new and growing field in veterinary and comparative medicine.