(Bio)medical informatics is an interdisciplinary field that is at the cutting edge of quantitative disciplines such as computer science, data science, and decision analysis and the practice of medicine. Students who apply come from diverse backgrounds but with the shared mission to improve our understanding and management of disease by harnessing biomedical data.
The Medical Informatics Home Area at UCLA provides Masters (M.S.) and Doctoral (Ph.D.) training on the design of computational algorithms and software to collect, analyze, and interpret clinical/biomedical data from diverse sources; the development and application of contemporary methods for database and knowledgebase creation from these data; the development and evaluation of methods for both biomedical knowledge discovery and data-driven clinical decision making; and the approaches required to translate these tools into real-world practice to inform a range of research and health-related activities. In addition to core courses that are offered by the Medical Informatics Home Area, students are encouraged to augment their training through courses offered by other departments at UCLA, including Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Bioengineering, Applied Mathematics, Statistics & Biostatistics, Information Studies, Bioinformatics, Physics in Biology and Medicine, and Human Genetics.