PHILADELPHIA—Jason H. Moore, PhD, the Edward Rose Professor of Informatics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, has been elected as a fellow of the American Statistical Association, the primary professional organization for statisticians and related professionals in the United States.
Moore, an expert in genetics and biomedical informatics, is also the director of the Penn Institute for Biomedical Informatics, which supports and collaborates with the large number of Penn faculty members who work in and make use of biomedical informatics in their basic and clinical research.
His research focuses on developing and applying artificial intelligence and machine learning methods for uncovering complex patterns in biomedical big data. A focal point is the use of informatics to identify combinations of DNA-sequence variations and environmental factors that predict human health and genetic disorders. For example, Moore developed the widely used multifactor dimensionality reduction open-source data mining application. Using relatively small sample sizes, it detects gene-gene and gene-environment interactions that may contribute to such diseases as atrial fibrillation, autism, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, schizophrenia, type II diabetes, and various cancers.
He has published over 450 peer-reviewed papers, editorials, and book chapters. Moore is also founding editor-in-chief of the journal BioData Mining and founding editor of the Cambridge University Press book series on systems genetics. He has served as editor and editorial board member of numerous professional publications.
Among his awards and accolades, Moore was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2011 and selected as a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences in 2013. He is also a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. He received his PhD and MS in human genetics from the University of Michigan, from which he also received an MA in applied statistics. He was founding director of the Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Sciences at the Geisel School of Medicine of Dartmouth College, where he was a faculty member from 2010 until 2015. He came to Penn in 2015 as the first permanent director of the Penn Institute for Biomedical Informatics. His translational bioinformatics research has been continuously funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health for more than 15 years.
Fellowships of the ASA are highly competitive, with the maximum number of recipients each year limited to one-third of one percent of the organization’s membership. Moore and other newly selected fellows will be recognized at an awards ceremony in August during the American Statistical Association’s Joint Statistical Meetings in Baltimore.
Penn Medicine is one of the world's leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, and excellence in patient care. Penn Medicine consists of the Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (founded in 1765 as the nation's first medical school) and the University of Pennsylvania Health System, which together form a $6.7 billion enterprise.
The Perelman School of Medicine has been ranked among the top five medical schools in the United States for the past 20 years, according to U.S. News & World Report's survey of research-oriented medical schools. The School is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $392 million awarded in the 2016 fiscal year.
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