by Mia Garchitorena

Paul Harris, PhD, professor of Biomedical Informatics, Biostatistics and director of the Office of Clinical Research Informatics in the Vanderbilt Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (VICTR), has been appointed to a new role as Vice President for Research Informatics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Harris will report to Peter Embí, MD, MS, professor and chair of Biomedical Informatics and Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at VUMC.

In this role, Harris will be responsible for advancing VUMC’s research capabilities, in particular, leading informatics aspects of data oversight and access, creating and disseminating clinical research informatics tools and service lines that support the VUMC research enterprise, and leading grants and programs that provide informatics expertise and infrastructure.

“I am excited about this opportunity to work with senior management to serve the VUMC researcher community,” said Harris. “Vanderbilt has a long and successful history in the field of biomedical informatics, and we are now in a golden age of transformational technology. I look forward to working on data assets and sharing initiatives that are designed to promote rapid research discovery and operational efficiency for our VUMC research teams.”

“I’ve had the privilege of knowing and working with Dr. Harris for many years as a leader in our field,” Embí said. “His informatics innovations have already transformed the research landscape, locally and globally. I’m excited to work with him in this new role as he leads efforts to make VUMC an even stronger environment for accelerating research and innovation,” he said.

“Dr. Harris is an innovative and expert informatics engineer and academic leader and a highly productive and collaborative researcher, educator and thought leader,” said Jennifer Pietenpol, PhD, Chief Scientific and Strategy Officer for VUMC. “He asks crucial questions and answers them with diverse and novel methods. He is also uniquely skilled at transformational design and implementation of new informatics tools within Vanderbilt’s ecosystem, across the nation and the world. I am thrilled with his new leadership role as we grow our research informatics capabilities to meet the growing demand of our biomedical discovery engine.”

Harris received a PhD in biomedical engineering from Vanderbilt University and has significant experience working in clinical and translational research informatics.

He serves as the corresponding principal investigator (PI) for the NIH All of Us Data and Research Center and the corresponding PI for the NIH/NCATS Recruitment Innovation Center, both housed at Vanderbilt.

Harris works with Gordon Bernard, MD, and Wesley Self, MD, MPH, as associate director for VICTR. He is also the founder and faculty lead for the REDCap data management platform (www.projectred-cap.org) that has been broadly adopted by more than 6,584 institutional partners and 2.7 million end users across 154 countries.

Harris is an elected fellow in the American College of Medical Informatics, the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. He is also a recipient of the Donald A.B. Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics, an American Medical Information Association signature award recognizing innovation in the field of informatics that has dramatically moved or changed the field.