Stanford-South Africa Biomedical Informatics

With increasing globalization, the spread of infectious agents is counted in hours not days or weeks. The speed at which we need to monitor, diagnose, and treat epidemics has risen exponentially. Meanwhile, modern molecular biology has given us the tools to probe organisms at the most fundamental level while simultaneously unleashing an avalanche of data which we can no longer analyze with traditional methods. The need to integrate biological data to understand the cause of disease, develop treatments and integrate with an increasingly mobile population leads to the need for a global biomedical informatics network. We must develop information technologies which can rapidly store, manage, visualize and integrate biomedical data in order to bring the power of modern biology to development of treatments for disease and rapidly deliver this information to the patient anywhere in the world.

The Stanford-South Africa Biomedical Informatics (SSABMI) Training Program expands teaching, training, and research opportunities for individuals interested in the application of informatics technologies to problems in biomedical research. The program is a partnership between the University of the Western Cape, the University of Cape Town, the National Institute of Communicable Diseases, and Stanford University. The SSABMI program is part of the Fogarty International Center's Informatics Training for Global Health (ITGH) initiative to develop informatics research capacity around the world. More about the ITGH Programs

The mission of the training program is to provide world-class education and research opportunities in biomedical informatics, leading to the next generation of interdisciplinary faculty and development of the field in South Africa.

The Stanford- South Africa Biomedical Informatics Program supports capacity development in biomedical informatics in South Africa by three (3) mechanisms: 1) development of a graduate curriculum that expands the existing bioinformatics graduate program at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) to include courses on medical informatics; 2) Availability of financial support for post-graduate trainees at UWC; 3) Supporting Visiting Scholars from South Africa to study at Stanford University or other universities located in the California Bay Area, such as, University of California, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Davis or Berkeley.

The program offers short courses open to post-graduate students or post-docs enrolled in biomedical or bioinformatics studies in South Africa. There is limited space for faculty, post-docs and graduate students from highly-related fields such as biology, medicine or computer science. Graduate students, post-docs and junior faculty from South Africa may apply for the Visiting Scholarship which will support biomedical informatics research and studies at Stanford and other universities located in the Bay Area. For details on the program including upcoming short courses, training opportunities, and how to apply, visit the Stanford-South Africa website.