This grant has ended and is part of our past portfolio of work.
The Vanderbilt NARI-NIE Informatics Training Program (VNNIT) is a partnership between Vanderbilt University and two leading research institutions in India, the National AIDS Research Institute (NARI) in Pune and the National Institute of Epidemiology (NIE) in Chennai. NARI and NIE are nodal institutes of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) the Indian counterpart to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), providing national level leadership in the field of biomedical and behavioral research in HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases, clinical and field epidemiology, and program monitoring and evaluation in India. This program seeks to develop capacity at NARI and NIE through collaborative training in research informatics and information management related to clinical, epidemiological, operations, and laboratory/basic science research, with a special emphasis on informatics needs in research related to HIV/AIDS and infectious diseases.
Specific focus areas for this training program are:
- Information management of clinical/laboratory databases in clinical trials and epidemiology studies
- Informatics for integrated program monitoring and evaluation, including data management, aggregation/integration, and quality assurance and control
- Informatics in research related to molecular virology and genetics.
The training is provided through: targeted India-based short-term training, workshops, and symposia; intermediate-term (6 months) training for NARI/ NIE affiliated scientists in the US; and long-term degree training (M.S. in Informatics) for NARI/ NIE affiliated scientists who will return to India and apply state-of-the-art information and communication technologies to research conducted at their parent institutions.
This five-year, $1.1 million grant from the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health is directed by Cynthia Gadd, Ph.D., associate professor and director of Educational Programs in the Department of Biomedical Informatics. Other faculty collaborators in this effort include Paul Harris, Ph.D.,Sten H. Vermund, M.D., Ph.D., Vikrant Sahasrabuddhe, M.B.B.S., Dr.P.H and David Haas, M.D.