Vignesh Subbian helps students dive into research with PHIRE
(From left) Waldo Guzman Barrientos is taking part in the Place-based Health Informatics Research Education program, with Megha Padi, PhD, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson’s Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine
Kris Hanning, U of A Health Sciences Office of Communications
Waldo Guzman Barrientos decided to transfer to the University of Arizona in 2022 to be closer to his family, which he said was the wisest decision of his young career.
At the U of A Health Sciences, Guzman Barrientos found the Place-based Health Informatics Research Education program. PHIRE – pronounced “fire” – is an undergraduate research training program that helped fulfill his dreams of using data science to conduct biological research, earning a doctorate in systems biology and, in the future, running his own research laboratory.
Vignesh Subbian, the program director of PHIRE and the associate director of health data sciences and research at the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Biostatistics, said the program was conceived in a conversation with PHIRE co-director Kacey Ernst, professor at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health and BIO5 Institute member.
“One of the things that drives and motivates me within the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Biostatistics and being involved with PHIRE is to bring people together across different disciplines to take on complex biomedical problems and questions,” said Subbian, also an associate professor of SIE and member of the BIO5 Institute. “We look at ways to foster better interactions and collaborations between human investigators and technologies through informatics.”
PHIRE was born out of the desire to help undergraduates become involved in the growing field of health informatics and was funded by a grant from the National Library of Medicine, a division of the National Institutes of Health.