NIH To Appoint Chief Data Official

The National Institutes of Health plans to recruit a new associate director to examine the potential for vast new troves of biomedical research data related to genomics, imaging, and electronic health records, the institute said Thursday.

NIH’s associate director for data science would be one of only a few high-ranking government officials tasked solely with managing how an agency handles data.

Government has been trying to capitalize on advances in so-called big data analysis for the past several years, including through a $200 million investment in data research. [...]