Jarek Meller, PhD, who is director of the graduate program for Biomedical Informatics at Cincinnati Children’s in partnership with the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and pursues research in bioinformatics and computational genomics, is helping with the collaboration.
“By bringing together outstanding brainpower and expertise in biomedicine and AI/machine learning, we hope to address unmet medical needs of children while training the next generation of cross-disciplinary researchers and sharing the results from the collaboration with institutions around the world,” Meller said.
The new collaboration is expected to include an opportunity for participating faculty to apply for two types of joint grants. One grant of $100,000 would be awarded for top scientific merit. Two to three grants of $50,000 would be awarded to further ongoing collaborations already established from previous joint symposia participation.
Cincinnati Children’s and Technion have collaborated in the past on joint research in multiple areas of medicine as well as post-doctoral training and academic symposiums in which faculty and students shared expertise.
Representing Technion in the collaboration are two scientists, both of whom have conducted research with Cincinnati Children’s:
- Shai Shen-Orr, PhD, a computational biologist with expertise in big data and immunology who leads the multidisciplinary Systems Immunology & Precision Medicine Laboratory at Technion’s Rappaport Faculty of Medicine.
- Yonatan “Yoni” Savir, PhD, who heads a lab in Technion’s Rappaport Faculty of Medicine that studies information processing in biological systems and its failure in aged cells.
“I can’t think of two better representatives of the remarkable collaboration between Cincinnati Children’s and Technion,” Rothenberg said.
Michelle Kohn, an international regional manager for Cincinnati Children’s, noted that Next-Gen Medicine is one of the flagship collaborations in the medical center’s Israel Exchange Program.
“The goal of the Israel Exchange Program is to leverage the complementary strengths of Cincinnati Children’s and Israel to improve clinical care for children worldwide, expertly train pediatric providers and scientists, achieve breakthrough discoveries, and invent and commercialize products to improve child health globally,” Kohn said.