UA Regents' Professor Appointed Director of NSF Health Program
Hsinchun Chen, University of Arizona Regents' Professor and the Brown Chair in Management and Technology at the Eller College of Management, has been appointed lead program director of the National Science Foundation's Smart and Connected Health Program.
Hsinchun Chen, University of Arizona Regents' Professor and the Brown Chair in Management and Technology at the Eller College of Management, has been appointed lead program director of the National Science Foundation's Smart and Connected Health Program.
The program funds research to develop innovative approaches to transforming health care from reactive and hospital-centered to preventive, proactive, evidence-based and person-centered, as well as focused on well-being rather than disease. It encourages existing and new research communities to focus on breakthrough idea areas including sensor technology, networking, information and machine learning technology, decision support systems, modeling of behavioral and cognitive processes and system and process modeling.
In his new role, Chen will coordinate over 10 program directors and 100 research projects, overseeing $100 million in program funding. He also will develop partnerships with the National Institutes of Health, other federal and international health agencies and industry.
"Healthcare IT research is facing a perfect storm for radical transformation," Chen said. "It is an honor for me to serve the community at such a critical time. I hope to foster and develop innovative, high-impact and transformational future healthcare technologies that can benefit patients, society and the world."
In the coming years, Chen will divide his time between Tucson and Washington, D.C. He begins his appointment in August.
Chen, an imminent scholar in data mining and informatics, is director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Eller College. It is through his lab that he developed the Dark Web project to track terrorism online, as well as the crime-fighting product COPLINK®, which allows law enforcement agencies to draw information from multiple databases and identify associations between crimes. The latter technology formed the basis of a spinoff company, Knowledge Computing Corp., which merged with crime analytics company i2 before being purchased by IBM.
Chen is the founder of Caduceus Intelligence Corp., a UA spinoff company in healthcare information systems. In 2013, he was awarded $5.4 million for two major cybersecurity grants and was also named the UA's Innovator of the Year.