DATE: Thursday, September 26, 2013
TIME: 12:00 - 1:00 pm
PLACE: CIC - 4th floor (ISTC Panther Hollow Room)

SPEAKER: Bradley Malin, Vanderbilt University

TITLE: Designing Practical Data Privacy Management Systems to Support Biomedical Research

ABSTRACT:
Just about everywhere you look, a wide array of different types of data are being collected en masse and in increasing detail. In the realm of healthcare, the data pertains to much more than your vital signs and clinical history. All sorts of data (e.g., genomic, proteomic, imaging, video) are being gathered, stored, and processed with increasing ease. As the quantity of data gets "big", so too do the concerns over the privacy of the patients -- especially when information is repurposed for research purposes in a "de-identified" manner. The goal of this talk is to review how de-identification can fail, but also how data management architectures can be intelligently designed to respect patient privacy using quantifiable and computational risk mitigation strategies. This talk will draw upon our research experience in building technologies and policies to manage and conduct research with a large de-identified biorepository (over one million patient records and 150,000 biospecimens) at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. At the same time, this talk will leverage examples of data privacy protection methods we have developed and verified in the context of the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) network, a consortia sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.

BIO:
Brad Malin is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Computer Science at Vanderbilt University, where he directs the Health Information Privacy Laboratory (HIPLab), which develops technologies that enable privacy in the context of real world organizational, political, and health information architectures. His research on de-identification (and re-identification) has been cited by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and featured in popular media outlets, including Nature News, Scientific American, Technology Review, and Wired magazine. In 2010, he received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers. He completed his education at Carnegie Mellon University, where he received a bachelor's in biological sciences (Mellon College of Science), master's in public policy and management (Heinz College), master's in machine learning (School of Computer Science), and doctorate in Computation, Organizations & Society (School of Computer Science).

HOST: Lorrie Cranor

SDI / ISTC SEMINAR QUESTIONS?
Karen Lindenfelser, 86716, or visit www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/