Assistant Dean for Healthcare Research Informatics - Marshall Health and Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine

Position Overview

Jointly, the Joan C Edwards School of Medicine (SOM) at Marshall University and the integrated academic health system, Marshall Health Network, seeks an innovative and visionary leader to serve as Assistant Dean for Healthcare Research Informatics. This dual-role position offers a unique opportunity to lead the development and integration of clinical, research and health informatics systems across the SOM and MHN, advancing Marshall’s commitment to excellence in clinical care, research, education, and operations.

The Assistant Dean for Healthcare Research Informatics will report on the academic side to the SOM Sr. Associate Dean of Informatics and Population Analytics and to the Vice Dean of Research.  On the clinical side, this role will report to the MHN Manager of Population Health Analytics and to the MHN Director of Application Development and Data Analytics.  The successful candidate will serve as the liaison to faculty, residents/fellows, and students leading clinical and translational research programs and clinical trials at the SOM.

The Assistant Dean for Healthcare Research Informatics will bridge the gap between complex clinical data (including electronic health records (EHRs), billing) and scientific discovery (e.g., “omic” characterization), ensuring that institutional investigators and multi-site research consortiums have secure, compliant, and seamless access to the electronic health records (EHRs), and health information technology to improve patient care and organizational efficiency for improving care quality and health outcomes.

The selected candidate will also provide strategic and technical leadership for enabling secure HIPAA compliant clinical-research data platforms, cloud infrastructure, and designing, governing, and operating clinical data warehouses and scalable data-sharing capabilities in an academic medical and healthcare research network environment.

Key Responsibilities

• Direct the design, deployment, and optimization of informatics tools to support cohort discovery, trial eligibility, recruitment, study management, and research data analytics.
• Implement data access and sharing platforms such as REDCap, i2b2, AWS Snowflake and OMOP-based data marts, and other electronic health records tools and software as used in research and clinical trials.
• Lead data harmonization efforts across standard health informatics models (OMOP CDM, PCORnet CDM, i2b2, ACT) to facilitate cohort discovery, federated authentication, and multi-site clinical analytics.
• Build honest broker systems for controlling requests and access to data and connecting the genomics data on AWS S3 buckets from Foundation Medicine and other partners with clinical data.

• Serve as the strategic and technical lead for Marshall Health Networks (MHN) use of Cerner/Oracle for Research, including governance, customization, and user support.
• Mentor and train informaticians, software engineers and database administrators to build a team to support further expansion of capabilities
• Collaborate with Marshall Health Network IT, Marshall IT, Informatics leads, and clinical faculty to align platform capabilities with grant-funded research priorities and budgets.
• Facilitate data access for fellows, residents and medical students to pull clinical and EHR data for research projects.
• Direct the architecture and governance of cloud-native research-data ecosystems (AWS, Snowflake) supporting millions of patient records across internal institutions and national research networks.

• Develop and govern agile/scrum processes, deployment pipelines (CI/CD, GitHub, Airflow), and project lifecycles to guarantee on-time delivery of funded-project commitments.

• Define and enforce security controls to ensure compliance, with HIPAA and CRDSA standards and other regulated data environments and institutional cloud infrastructure.

Required Qualifications

• Master’s degree or PhD in Biomedical Informatics, Computer Science, Health Informatics, or a closely related quantitative field.
• Minimum of 5 years’ experience leading research informatics initiatives in an academic health system,  translational research environment or industry.
• Record of scholarly productivity and leadership in clinical research informatics, evidenced by publications, grants, or national roles.
• Experience with Cerner/Oracle, REDCap, i2b2, AWS Snowflake, and TriNetX and other electronic health records tools and software as used in research and clinical trials.
• Familiarity with institutional review board (IRB) process, federal regulations and ethical standards governing human subjects research and health information privacy (e.g., HIPAA), Clinical Trial Data Sharing Alliance (CRDSA) standards as well as enterprise-scale medical terminology mapping (LOINC, RxNorm, SNOMED).

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep technical expertise in clinical data warehousing utilizing PCORnet CDM, OMOP CDM, and HL7 FHIR / SMART-on-FHIR.
• Prior experience with IDeA-CTR, CTSA programs or large-scale collaborative research initiatives.
• Proven ability to interface with institutional executives, academic investigators, external vendor networks (e.g., GPC, Cerner/Epic teams), and compliance officers.
• Advanced proficiency with Snowflake organization administration (data sharing, subaccount governance, cost monitoring) and AWS cloud architecture.
• Hands-on experience with ETL/ELT pipelines, SQL-based data transformations, Airflow orchestration, and modern data-validation apps (e.g., Streamlit).
• Experience constructing secure AI/ML data enclaves and NLP-driven document ontology mapping for EHR text analysis.
• Demonstrated success in developing, maintaining and implementing enterprise-wide informatics tools or platforms.
• Ability to work collaboratively with academic, clinical, and operational leaders and faculty with interdisciplinary backgrounds.