Starren Pioneered Biomedical Informatics Innovations
NUCATS Deputy Director Stepping Down After Decade-plus Tenure
Having helped guide the Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Sciences (NUCATS) Institute through numerous $40-million-plus NIH grant submissions, Justin Starren, MD, PhD, FACMI, is stepping down from his role as deputy director.
When Starren arrived at Northwestern in 2010, the NUCATS Institute was in its infancy and the division he would soon chair didn’t exist.
“Justin deserves immense credit for the reorganization of the Institute that started in 2012,” says Donald Lloyd-Jones, MD, ScM, Eileen M. Foell Professor and former NUCATS director. “The faculty that Justin has recruited and mentored have not only had great success in their own right, but they have helped fundamentally revolutionize and entrench the clinical and informatics infrastructure at Feinberg.”
As founding chief of the Division of Health and Biomedical Informatics, deputy director at NUCATS, and director of the Feinberg Center for Biomedical Informatics and Data Science, Starren also continued a research career focused on the translation of computer and informatics research into real-world solutions.
“Our mantra for NUCATS when I started was to ‘make the right things easy,’ Starren recalls. “That has really guided us ever since, as we’ve expanded the Enterprise Data Warehouse, standardized research processes, enhanced REDCap, implemented the clinical trials management system, stabilized our community outreach system, and expanded the MSCI degree program. NUCATS is now the nexus for translational research at Northwestern and a place people to go for critical resources and training.”
Starren has been involved with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical & Translational Science Award (CTSA) consortium since 2006, when he served as founding informatics director at the University of Wisconsin CTSA hub. Effective March 25, Starren will become director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Biostatistics at the University of Arizona, where he will also be a professor of Medical Imaging.
For every grant that I am on, every initiative I'm leading, and every program I run, there's now someone at Northwestern who can take those over and run with them into the future.”
“Justin’s innovative contributions and steadfast dedication leave a legacy that will persist through the next iteration of the NUCATS Institute,” says current director Rich D’Aquila. “The informatics advancements he helped to usher in permeate the clinical and translational research enterprise at Northwestern. We are immensely grateful for all he has helped us achieve as a team. As an individual, I am also extremely appreciative of how much Justin’s wise counsel and keen intellect as deputy director has helped me.”
Nationally, Starren is credited with being one of the original creators of the informatics community within the NIH-CTSA program and he has co-chaired and been a driving force of a group that has defined many of the common platforms in use today to get electronic health records to talk to each other across institutions.
Starren also led a nine-hub CTSA consortium to integrate Patient Reported Outcomes (PROs) into electronic health records (EASI-PRO) and he led a CTSA workgroup that just completed development of a Clinical Trials Management Ecosystem Maturity Model. His leadership has also galvanized informatics in other large projects, including the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) Consortium and the Successful Clinical Response in Pneumonia Therapy (SCRIPT) Systems Biology Center.
“In all these roles, I’ve served as a bridge between the research and clinical computing realms,” Starren says. “Each role has required managing diverse teams and delivering results on an enterprise, multi-institution, statewide, and national scale. Equally important, these projects involved integrating new data types and activities (e.g. telehealth, genomics, and PRO data) into the workflows of both clinicians and patients from diverse communities.”
Starren earned his bachelor’s degree from Washington University in St. Louis before completing an MD-MA Combined Program in immunogenetics. Other training included internal medicine internship at UCLA and a research fellowship in medical informatics at Columbia University, where he also completed his PhD in Medical Informatics.
“Justin has a strong medical and clinical background, an incredibly strong business background, and a very incisive mind,” says Lloyd-Jones. “He has always been great at identifying what is core to the mission, what is a distraction, and where we should be putting our resources. His background and approach to the world is invaluable but there is nothing more meaningful to me than to be able to continue to call him a colleague and friend.”
“I think my biggest contribution to Northwestern was to try to make myself unnecessary,” Starren says. “We have recruited people, built systems, and established processes that will continue to run seamlessly long after I am gone. For every grant that I am on, every initiative I'm leading, and every program I run, there's now someone at Northwestern who can take those over and run with them into the future.”
NUCATS leadership including Sara Becker, PhD, Clyde Yancy, MD, and D’Aquila, issued a joint statement acknowledging that accomplishment: “We appreciate Justin’s wisdom in crafting the informatics component in our recent application in a manner that ensures that each initiative is undertaken by an expert team that will ably accomplish all proposed objectives. We will miss working with our close colleague daily and wish him every success. We look forward to continued collaborations with Justin as he continues to forge even more nation-leading contributions in health informatics.”
Written by Roger Anderson
