GSLIS welcomes Ian Brooks, who has joined the staff as a research scientist. He will represent both GSLIS and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) as a liaison to the health sciences community. In this role, Brooks will help maintain and develop research relationships between GSLIS and NCSA in the area of health science information and work with GSLIS faculty on externally funded projects and new initiatives.
"The faculty, staff, and students are very excited to have Dr. Brooks joining the GSLIS research team,” said J. Stephen Downie, GSLIS professor and associate dean for research. “We are especially looking forward to working with Ian as he creates new advances in the area of health informatics that will most certainly have global impact."
In addition to his new role with GSLIS, Brooks will continue to direct NCSA's Health Sciences Group. He also serves as a faculty affiliate in the University of Illinois Center for Health, Aging, and Disability and Center for African Studies, as well as an adjunct professor at the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Nursing. Brooks serves on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s external advisory board for high performance computing, as well as the Pan American Health Organization’s eHealth Strategy and Plan of Action external advisory board.
Previously, Brooks conducted research at SmithKline Beecham in areas including HIV/AIDS, Alzheimer’s disease, and heart disease, and led the statistics and life science sections at Wolfram Research. He received a bachelor of science in biophysics from the University of York, a master of science in applied and engineering physics from Cornell, and a PhD in biochemistry from Bryn Mawr College.