DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology (DMICE) of Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) is pleased to submit a competitive continuation for its National Library of Medicine (NLM) fellowship training program for a fourth five-year cycle of funding. Founded in 1992, the OHSU program has been an innovator and leader in the field, and we this proposal as further advances our contributions to developing the academic discipline of biomedical informatics. The main goal of the OHSU fellowship program in biomedical informatics is to train future researchers and leaders in the field. These are exciting as well as changing times for the discipline. The value of information technology (IT) in all aspects of biomedicine has been recognized by the larger biomedical community. At OHSU and other leading institutions in the field, this has been rewarded through designation of departmental or related status as well as promotion of faculty based on their accomplishments in the discipline. The core competency of graduates from the OHSU NLM fellowship program is to use informatics theory and applications to conduct health and biomedical research. The primary purpose of this research should be to improve human health as well as develop preventive and therapeutic interventions for human disease. In addition, graduates should be able to make scientific contributions to fields related to informatics, including but not limited to medicine, nursing, public health, other health professions, computer science, library and information science, cognitive science, and organizational and management science. We also expect that our graduates will become leaders in the other facets of the field, such as education, thought leadership, and/or administration. In this next cycle of funding, we propose to enhance the program by demarcating a more explicit separation of training for research and applied informatics, establishing separate tracks for medical informatics and bioinformatics, and expanding its capacity. We also aim to align the program more closely with other research centers, programs, and departments at OHSU as well as establish a more concentrated effort to recruit, matriculate, and graduate underrepresented minorities.