Naresh Sundar Rajan Receives Prestigious Big Data Fellowship

Naresh Sundar Rajan has been awarded a prestigious fellowship to attend the Big Data Coursework for Computational Medicine (BDC4CM) funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). He is mentored by Julio Facelli, Ph.D., professor of biomedical informatics and associate director of the Center for Clinical and Translational Sciences, and Ram Gouripeddi, M.B.B.S., M.S., assistant professor of biomedical informatics and senior biomedical informatics scientist of the Center for Clinical and Translational Sciences.

Rajan is devising an automated and scalable service-oriented architecture solutions for data quality problems in health data, such as data from medical records. Clinical researchers spend enormous amount of time in understanding the quality of data for their potential study cohort. The data typically have issues such as missing values, consistency issues, and inaccurate representations. Rajan is developing scalable computational methods to automate the identification of these anomalies in a clinical data warehouse. His work leverages the informatics platform OpenFurther, which has been developed by the Biomedical Informatics Core of the CCTS under Facelli’s direction. Simultaneously, he is developing ways to represent the data quality dimensions visually, making it easier for clinical researchers and other users to decide whether, or how, to use them.

Rajan was one of 20 applicants from across the nation selected for the BDC4CM fellowship. The course offers tailored instruction, hands-on laboratory modules, and case studies to help fellows develop new skills in big data computing. While taking part in the workshop, he’ll have the opportunity to interact with distinguished scholars and world-renowned experts from academia and industry, allowing for unparalleled instruction and insight.

“The nascent field of Big Data in Healthcare has promising techniques that could be leveraged in complex Health IT systems,” says Rajan. “By participating in this course, I will expand my knowledge in understanding and implementing scalable, transparent, and customized next generation products.”