Mandl, an attending physician in Children's Department of Emergency Medicine, research director of Children's Biopreparedness Center and investigator in the Children's Hospital Informatics Program (CHIP), led the development of an automated biosurveillance system that can monitor for bioterrorist attacks as well as outbreaks of ordinary diseases, like flu, in real time. Now part of daily emergency department operations at Children's, the system analyzes new patient data and compares it with data from previous medical visits, flagging abnormal disease clusters or symptom patterns. It has been expanded for use by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, integrating medical data across geographic regions.
"We will use the PECASE award to extend our research and roll out real-world applications to monitor the health of populations in real time," Mandl says. "While we'll be addressing health protection for people of all ages, we will have a special focus on children's health at the regional and national levels."
Mandl, also an assistant professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and part of the Affiliated Faculty of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, was nominated for the PECASE award by the NIH's National Library of Medicine.
The PECASE awards, established in 1996, are intended to recognize and nurture outstanding beginning scientists and engineers who "show exceptional potential for leadership at the frontiers of scientific knowledge during the twenty-first century." Awardees receive up to five years of funding to further their research.
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Contact: Rachel Pugh
rachel.pugh@childrens.harvard.edu
617-355-6420
Children's Hospital Boston
14-Jun-2005