Educational Technology

The University of Michigan over five years will invest $100 million in a big data initiative with researchers seeking insights in four targeted areas—healthcare, learning analytics, social sciences, and transportation. Improving personalized healthcare delivery is at the heart of the health sciences/medicine component of the university’s Data Science Initiative. By tapping into DNA sequencing, electronic health records and other sources of big data, U-Michigan researchers hope to translate basic research into patient care based on more precisely diagnosing an individual’s risk for certain types of diseases and coming up with the most effective medical therapies. As part of the Data Science Initiative, U-M will hire 35 new faculty members, expand the university’s research computing capacity and strengthen its data management, storage, analytics and training resources. “We have a substantial personalized health/precision medicine footprint here,” says Alfred Hero, Ph.D., co-director of the new Michigan Institute for Data Science, which was created under the initiative and has an interdisciplinary core faculty of 40 data scientists. “There’s roughly $10 million that will be invested for the computational infrastructure for handling very large data sets.”