New Executive Sponsor – Health Informatics and Data Science

Dr Douglas Pires is the new Executive co-Sponsor for our Health Informatics and Data Science theme at the Centre for Digital Transformation of Health.

Dr Douglas Pires has been appointed as the new Executive co-Sponsor for our Health Informatics and Data Science theme at the Centre for Digital Transformation of Health.

Douglas is already well known to the Centre as a senior lecturer in Digital Health at the School of Computing and Information Science (CIS). Previously, he was a group leader and researcher in public health at Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Brazil.

Douglas was also a postdoctoral researcher fellow at the University of Cambridge and University of Melbourne. He received a BSc in Computer Science and a PhD in Bioinformatics from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil. His research interests include Computational Biology, Translational Bioinformatics and Machine Learning.

As one of the Centre’s three Executive Sponsors, Douglas will be responsible for implementing the Centre's strategy on health informatics and data science and fostering a research environment in which data-driven clinical research can flourish. 

A major challenge around health data is that much of it remains stuck at the collection stage. Douglas will be working with co-Sponsor and Deputy Director Daniel Capurro to ensure that health informatics expertise is front and centre of the transformation necessary to render health data clinically useful.

Douglas will also be instrumental in translating health data-driven research ideas and concepts into research plans and collaborative projects. He’ll be working closely with the Data-driven Healthcare Research Steering Group co-auspiced by the Melbourne Academic Centre for Health and this Centre to develop priorities that meet the needs of healthcare organisations and clinicians.

The ultimate goal of this work is a learning healthcare system capable of generating evidence for practice change, and of measuring health outcomes that matter to patients.