PHILADELPHIA — Danielle Mowery, PhD, 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). 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.
“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, PhD, 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 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 healthcare. The demand for these skills and expertise has paralleled the explosion of EHRs that have made access to clinical data more routine. 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 healthcare technology, to not only solve today’s healthcare 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, 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.
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, and will also participate in research and teaching in her role as an assistant professor of Informatics in the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics.
Penn Medicine is one of the world’s leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, excellence in patient care, and community service. The organization consists of the University of Pennsylvania Health System and Penn’s Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine, founded in 1765 as the nation’s first medical school.
The Perelman School of Medicine is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $550 million awarded in the 2022 fiscal year. Home to a proud history of “firsts” in medicine, Penn Medicine teams have pioneered discoveries and innovations that have shaped modern medicine, including recent breakthroughs such as CAR T cell therapy for cancer and the mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccines.
The University of Pennsylvania Health System’s patient care facilities stretch from the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania to the New Jersey shore. These include the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, Chester County Hospital, Lancaster General Health, Penn Medicine Princeton Health, and Pennsylvania Hospital—the nation’s first hospital, founded in 1751. Additional facilities and enterprises include Good Shepherd Penn Partners, Penn Medicine at Home, Lancaster Behavioral Health Hospital, and Princeton House Behavioral Health, among others.
Penn Medicine is an $11.1 billion enterprise powered by more than 49,000 talented faculty and staff.