Danielle Mowery has joined Penn Medicine as its inaugural chief research information officer (CRIO) and leader of the Clinical Research Informatics Core (CIC) in the Institute for Biomedical Informatics (IBI). Dr. Mowery will serve as a key executive responsible for advancing clinical and translational research for the University of Pennsylvania Health System and Perelman School of Medicine.

“Danielle Mowery has hit the ground running and will be an important connector of faculty and leadership in basic science and clinical departments across Penn Medicine,” said Jason Moore, director of IBI, senior associate dean for Informatics and the Edward Rose Professor of Informatics. “The CRIO position is critical to our efforts to improve patient health through innovative research discoveries arising from use of our rich clinical data resources.”

The CRIO role was developed nationally about 10 years ago in recognition of the need to foster research with clinical data to improve health care. While the role of the CRIO at each academic medical center across the country is different, they all share the same common theme and goals of improving health through data. Central to this effort at Penn Medicine is the newly created CIC that provides clinical data access, artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing and visual analytics services to all Penn Medicine investigators.

“This position is invaluable for utilizing the latest advances in health-care technology to not only solve today’s health-care challenges but to foster discoveries with broad health applications,” said Michael Restuccia, senior vice president and chief information officer at Penn Medicine. “Penn Medicine is well positioned to build upon its leadership in many of these areas, and I’m excited for what the future holds.”

In addition to working directly with clinicians and researchers, Dr. Mowery will be responsible for bringing computational methods and technology, such as the newly developed Penn AI system and the Penn TURBO system for data integration and inference, to the Penn Medicine research community through the IBI CIC. She will also utilize the IBI Idea Factory, the first visual analytics facility of its kind at Penn, to bring data and results exploration to investigators through immersive visualization and collaboration in a single location.

Dr. Mowery earned a master of science and doctorate in biomedical informatics from the University of Pittsburgh, followed by postdoctoral studies at the University of Utah, where she has served as director of the Natural Language Processing Service Line and as a health science officer for the VA Salt Lake City Healthcare System. She has research expertise in natural language processing and text mining with application to clinical data. She will also participate in research and teaching in her role as an assistant professor of informatics in the department of biostatistics, epidemiology and informatics.