Griffin Weber

Griffin Weber, MD, PhD

Associate Professor of Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School (Secondary)

Griffin Weber directs the Biomedical Research Informatics Core (BRIC) at BIDMC. A result of his research in expertise mining and social network analysis is his invention of an open source social networking website for scientists called Profiles RNS, now used at dozens of universities across the country. It automatically mines large datasets such as PubMed, NIH ExPORTER, and the U.S. patent database to discover investigators' research areas and scientific networks. It then presents these connections using temporal, geospatial, and network visualizations. The software has numerous applications, ranging from finding individual collaborators and mentors to understanding the dynamics of an entire research community.

Weber is also an investigator on Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2), an NIH National Center for Biomedical Computing, for which he helped developed a web-based open source platform that enables a variety of functions, including queries of large clinical repositories for hypothesis testing and identification of patients for clinical trials. He also created the original prototype software for the Shared Health Research Information Network (SHRINE), which is a federated query tool that connects i2b2 databases across multiple institutions. More than 100 institutions worldwide use i2b2 and SHRINE to support clinical research.

Weber received his M.D. and Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard University in 2007. While still a student, he became the first Chief Technology Officer of Harvard Medical School and built an educational web portal that provides interactive online content to over 500 courses. His past research projects also include analyzing DNA microarrays, modeling the growth of breast cancer tumors, and creating algorithms for predicting life expectancy.

Federated queries of clinical data repositories: the sum of the parts does not equal the whole.
Authors: Weber GM.
J Am Med Inform Assoc
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Identifying translational science within the triangle of biomedicine.
Authors: Weber GM.
J Transl Med
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Extracting physician group intelligence from electronic health records to support evidence based medicine.
Authors: Weber GM, Kohane IS.
PLoS One
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How many patients are "normal"? Only 1.55%.
Authors: Weber GM.
AMIA Jt Summits Transl Sci Proc
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SHRINE: enabling nationally scalable multi-site disease studies.
Authors: McMurry AJ, Murphy SN, MacFadden D, Weber G, Simons WW, Orechia J, Bickel J, Wattanasin N, Gilbert C, Trevvett P, Churchill S, Kohane IS.
PLoS One
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An i2b2-based, generalizable, open source, self-scaling chronic disease registry.
Authors: Natter MD, Quan J, Ortiz DM, Bousvaros A, Ilowite NT, Inman CJ, Marsolo K, McMurry AJ, Sandborg CI, Schanberg LE, Wallace CA, Warren RW, Weber GM, Mandl KD.
J Am Med Inform Assoc
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Current state of information technologies for the clinical research enterprise across academic medical centers.
Authors: Murphy SN, Dubey A, Embi PJ, Harris PA, Richter BG, Turisco F, Weber GM, Tcheng JE, Keogh D.
Clin Transl Sci
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The co-morbidity burden of children and young adults with autism spectrum disorders.
Authors: Kohane IS, McMurry A, Weber G, MacFadden D, Rappaport L, Kunkel L, Bickel J, Wattanasin N, Spence S, Murphy S, Churchill S.
PLoS One
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Direct2Experts: a pilot national network to demonstrate interoperability among research-networking platforms.
Authors: Weber GM, Barnett W, Conlon M, Eichmann D, Kibbe W, Falk-Krzesinski H, Halaas M, Johnson L, Meeks E, Mitchell D, Schleyer T, Stallings S, Warden M, Kahlon M.
J Am Med Inform Assoc
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An online evidence-based decision support system for distinguishing benign from malignant vertebral compression fractures by magnetic resonance imaging feature analysis.
Authors: Wang KC, Jeanmenne A, Weber GM, Thawait SK, Thawait S, Carrino JA.
J Digit Imaging
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