caBIG 2009 Deployment Award goes to UAB

A team of researchers and information technology specialists at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Comprehensive Cancer Center has won the caBIG 2009 Deployment Award from the National Cancer Institute (NCI).

The award honors the university's progress towards adopting the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid, or caBIG. The project is a NCI-led, secure online resource of shared data and software used to improve and boost cancer-research collaboration. Today, more than 1,500 individuals from more than 450 research centers and organizations worldwide use caBIG and contribute to its projects.

"This team from the University of Alabama at Birmingham undertook a major initiative to adapt its existing data-entry system to work with caBIG tools and within the caBIG infrastructure," NCI officials said at an award ceremony in July in Washington, D.C. "The pioneering efforts of the team have resulted in a tremendous amount of institutional knowledge about the adaptation process. Moreover, the UAB team has embraced the caBIG vision and continues to share what they have learned with other disciplines."

The UAB deployment is a partnership between the Cancer Center, the UAB Center for Clinical and Translational Science, UAB Health System Information Services and the UAB Information Technology High Performance Computing Services group. The team has been working for several years on caBIG implementation, access projects and expanding the sharing potential between the university and other U.S. cancer centers.

Those named in the UAB caBIG Deployment Award are Christie Bellah; Geoff Gordon, M.S.E.E.; Rajesh Pillai; Poornima Pochana; John-Paul Robinson; John Sandefur, M.B.A.; David Shealy, Ph.D.; and Matthew Wyatt, M.S.H.I.