OMB No. 0925-0001/0002 (Rev. 08/12 Approved Through 8/31/2015)
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Provide the following information for the Senior/key personnel and other significant contributors.
Follow this format for each person. DO NOT EXCEED FIVE PAGES.
NAME: Becich,
Michael J
eRA COMMONS USER NAME (credential, e.g., agency login): Becich
POSITION TITLE: Chairman
and Professor, Graduate Faculty, Department of Biomedical Informatics,
University of Pittsburgh
EDUCATION/TRAINING (Begin with baccalaureate or other initial professional education, such as nursing, include postdoctoral training and residency
training if applicable. Add/delete rows as necessary.)
INSTITUTION AND LOCATION
DEGREE
(if applicable)
Completion Date
MM/YYYY
FIELD OF STUDY
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
BA
06/1977
Biology
Northwestern University, Chicago, IL
MD, PhD
06/1984
Medicine and
Experimental Pathology
A. Personal Statement (from over 200 publications)
Dr. Becich is Professor and inaugural Chairman of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He is jointly appointed in Pathology, Information
Sciences/Telecommunications and Clinical/Translational Research. He is Associate Director of the
University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute as well as the Clinical and Translational Science Institute at the
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Dr. Becich’s research interests are focused on the interface
between clinical informatics and bioinformatics. His research is funded by the CDC, NCATS, NCI,
NHLBI and NLM and includes clinical phenotyping of patients for genomic/personalized medicine,
tissue banking informatics, clinical informatics and bioinformatics with a special emphasis on data
sharing. Dr. Becich is interested in transforming clinical care through translational research and
creating a learning health system focused on cost effective, high quality and safe care through
personalized medicine. For a full research profile see https://digitalvita.pitt.edu/dvprofiles/becich.
Dr. Becich is the Co-leader of the Consortium Component of the BD2K Center for Causal Discovery
(CCD). He will oversee the CCD activities of the current pilot project.
1. Borromeo CD, Schleyer TK, Becich MJ, Hochheiser H. Finding collaborators: toward interactive
discovery tools for research network systems. Journal of Medical Internet Research. 2014; 16
(11):e244. doi: 10.2196/jmir.3444
2. Amin W, Parwani AV, Jonathan M, Raja F, Arjun P, Federico V, Nancy WB, Rodeny L, James L,
Michael F, Harvey PI, Becich MJ. National Mesothelioma Virtual Bank: A Platform for Collaborative
Research and Mesothelioma Biobanking Resource to Support Translational Research. Lung
Cancer International. 2013 Aug 13; 2013:9. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/765748
3. Gullapalli RR, Lyons-Weiler M, Petrosko P, Dhir R, Becich MJ, LaFramboise WA. Clinical
integration of next-generation sequencing technology. Clinics in Laboratory Medicine. 2012 Dec; 32
(4):585-99. PMCID: PMC3479671
4. Gullapalli RR, Desai KV, Santana-Santos L, Kant JA, Becich MJ. Next generation sequencing in
clinical medicine: Challenges and lessons for pathology and biomedical informatics. Journal of
pathology informatics. 2012; 3:40. PMCID: PMC3519097
B. Positions and Honors
Positions and Employment
2008 - Present
2006 - Present
2004 - 2006
2002 - 2008
2001 - 2006
2000
2000 - 2006
2000 - 2002
2000 - 2004
1998 - 2000
1996 - 1998
1991 - 1996
1989 - 1991
1987 - 1989
1985 - 1987
1984 - 1985
Professor, Pathology, Information Sciences/Telecommunications,
Clinical/Translational Sciences, Graduate Faculty, Department of Biomedical
Informatics, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA
Chairman and Professor, Graduate Faculty, Department of Biomedical
Informatics, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA
Vice Chair of Pathology Informatics, School of Medicine, University of
Pittsburgh , Pittsburgh, PA
Professor of Pathology, Information Sciences and Telecommunications,
Graduate Faculty, Department of Pathology, University of Pittsburgh
Director, Benedum Oncology Informatics Center, University of Pittsburgh
Cancer Institute, Pittsburgh, PA
Interim Chief of Pathology, Department of Pathology, Div of Cellular and
Molecular Pathology, UPMC Shadyside
Director, Department of Pathology, Center for Pathology Informatics,
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA
Associate Professor/Graduate Faculty, Division of Cellular and Molecular
Pathology; and School of Information Sciences and Telecommunications,
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA
Chairman (Chief) of Pathology, Department of Pathology, UPMC Shadyside,
Associate Professor/Graduate Faculty, Division of Cellular and Molecular
Pathology; and School of Information Sciences and Telecommunications ,
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA
Associate Professor/Graduate Faculty, Division of Cellular and Molecular
Pathology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA
Assistant Professor/Graduate Faculty, Division of Cellular and Molecular
Pathology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA
Instructor, School of Medicine, Washington University, St. Louis, MO
Fellow, School of Medicine, Washington University, St. Louis, MO
Resident, School of Medicine, Washington University, St. Louis, MO
Intern, School of Medicine, Washington University , St. Louis, MO
Other Experience and Professional Memberships
1990 - Present
1990 - Present
1991 - Present
1994 - Present
1995 - Present
1996 - Present
2000 - Present
Member, College of American Pathologists
Member, American Society of Clinical Pathologists
Member, Pittsburgh Pathology Society
Member, University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute
Member, American Association for Cancer Research, Inc.
Member, American Medical Informatics Association
Member, Association for Pathology Informatics
Honors
1976
1979 - 1982
1980 - 1983
1981 - 1983
1983
1986 - 1989
1989
Summer Fellow, Dept. of Pathology, Northwestern University Medical School
Graduate Fellowship, Dept. of Pathology, Northwestern Univ Medical School
National Student Forum Participant
Graduate Research Assistant Scholarship
Medical Student Research Fellowship Award, University of Nebraska
National Cancer Institute (NCI) Cancer Biology Fellowship Program
Fellow of the College of American Pathologists - FACP
1992
1999
1999
1999
2000
2000
2000
2000
2001
2001
2001
2001
2002
2006
Pathology Teaching Award for Anatomic Pathology, University of Pittsburgh
Visiting Professor of Pathology, MD Anderson Medical Center, Houston, TX
Intel Internet Health Hero - http://www.intel.com/intel/e-health/heroes.htm and
http://www.intel.com/intel/e-health/becich.htm
Guest Distinguished Visiting Professorship of Pathology, Johns Hopkins
University, Baltimore, MD
Quest Distinguished Visiting Professor of Pathology, Harvard University,
Boston, MA
Visiting Professor of Pathology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
Distinguished Visiting Professorship of Pathology, The Leo Kaplan, MD
Lectureship, UCLA, Cedar Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA
Distinguished Visiting Professorship of Pathology, 17th Annual Francis P.
Boland, MD Memorial Surgical Symposium, Univ Scranton, Scranton, PA
Visiting Professor of Pathology, Emory Univ School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA
Visiting Professor of Pathology, Montefiore Medical Center, Bronx, NY
Visiting Professor of Pathology, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH
Visiting Professor of Pathology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN
Distinguished Visiting Professor, Mount Sinai Hospital, 38th Harold G Pritzker
Memorial Lecture, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Elected Fellow, American College of Medical Informatics (FACMI)
C. Contribution to Science (from over 200 publications)
1. Dr. Becich has significantly impacted three keys areas of science, including Pathology Informatics,
tissue banking and Biomedical Informatics. In 1991, Dr. Becich founded the Division of Pathology
Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine (UPSoM). He is considered one of the
pioneers in this area and began the Pathology Informatics Summit (formerly APIII) in 1996 which led
to the formation of the Association for Pathology Informatics (API) in 2000. The API has over 350
members and now hosts the Journal for Pathology Informatics. Many of Dr. Becich’s innovations are
in the area of clinical phenotype extraction from medical records and coupling this information with
“best practices” biospecimen repositories and associated genomic data to enable discovery
science. As founding chair of the Department of Biomedical informatics (2006) at UPSoM he has
mentored several faculty and trainees whom are now leaders in this emerging discipline. As the 50th
most cited author in Biomedical Informatics, Dr. Becich continues to innovate in team science as a
funded member of the PCORI Clinical Data Research Network (11 sites with over 200 nodes), the
NCATS Accrual to Clinical Trials network (20 sites) and the Big Data to Knowledge, Center for
Causal Discovery (CCD, 11 sites with over 50 nodes). The Department of Biomedical Informatics at
UPSoM, that Dr. Becich leads, has $15M in NIH funding for CY2015 including six U-team science
grants from CDC, NCATS, NCIx2, NIGMS and NHGRI.
a.
b.
c.
Amin W, Tsui FR, Borromeo C, Chuang CH, Espino JU, Ford D, Hwang W, Kapoor W,
Lehmann H, Martich GD, Morton S, Paranjape A, Shirey W, Sorensen A, Becich MJ, Hess
R. PaTH: towards a learning health system in the Mid-Atlantic region. J Am Med Inform
Assoc. 2014 Jul-Aug;21(4):633-6. Epub 2014 May 12. PMID: 24821745
Amin W, Singh H, Pople AK, Winters SB, Dhir R, Parwani AV, Becich MJ. A decade of
experience in the development and implementation of tissue banking informatics tools for
intra and inter-institutional translational research. Journal of Pathology Informatics. Journal
of Pathology Informatics. 2010 Aug 10; 1 (12). PMCID: PMC2941965
Kang HP, Borromeo CD, Berman JJ, Becich MJ. The tissue microarray OWL schema: An
open-source tool for sharing tissue microarray data. Journal of Pathology Informatics. 2010;
d.
1. PMCID: PMC2929536
Bernstam EV, Hersh WR, Johnson SB, Chute CG, Nguyen H, Sim I, Nahm M, Weiner MG,
Miller P, DiLaura RP, Overcash M, Lehmann HP, Eichmann D, Athey BD, Scheuermann
RH, Anderson N, Starren J, Harris PA, Smith JW, Barbour E, Silverstein JC, Krusch DA,
Nagarajan R, Becich MJ, CTSA Biomedical Informatics Key Function Committee.
Synergies and distinctions between computational disciplines in biomedical research:
perspective from the Clinical and Translational Science Award programs. Academic
Medicine. 2009 Jul; 84 (7):964-70. PMCID: PMC2884382
Complete List of Published Work in MyBibliography:
D. Research Support
Ongoing Research Support
U24 OH009077-08 (Michael J. Becich)
09/30/14 - 09/29/16
NIOSH/CDC
Continuation of the Expansion of the National Mesthelioma Virtual Registry and Tissue Bank
NMVB provides a unique 1500 patient biospecimen & data resource for mesothelioma investigators.
Role: PI (multiple)
U54 (Cooper, Bahar, Berg)
09/15/14 - 08/31/18
NIH/NLM
Center for Causal Modeling and Discovery of Biomedical Knowledge (CCMD) from Big Data
Much of science consists of discovering and modeling causal relationships that occur in nature.
Increasingly big data are being used to drive such discoveries. There is a pressing need for methods
that can efficiently infer causal networks from large and diverse types of biomedical data and
background knowledge. This center of excellence will develop, implement, and evaluate an integrated
set of tools that support causal modeling and discovery (CMD) of biomedical knowledge from very large
and complex biomedical data. This Center will make these methods widely available, highly efficient
when applied to big datasets, and easy to use. The proposed Center will provide a powerful set of
concepts and tools that accelerate the discovery and sharing of causal knowledge derived from very
large and complex biomedical datasets. The approaches and products emanating from this center of
excellence are likely to have a significant positive impact on our understanding of health and disease,
and thereby on the improvement of human health.
Role: Co-Investigator and Consortium Activities Component Co-Leader
5 UL1TR000005-09 (Steve Reis)
09/01/14 - 08/31/15
NIH/NCATS
CTSA NCATS Supplement
Enhancing accrual to clinical trials is a national priority. NCATS has approved a supplement to our
parent CTSA grant to lead an effort to link the 60 CTSA sites. Pittsburgh (Ries), Harvard (Nadler) and
UT Southwestern (Toto) as CTSA PIs along with Harvard (McFadden) and Pittsburgh
(Becich/Visweswaran) will create an informatics infrastructure using custom programming to i2b2 and
SHRINE to accomplish this important goal. In “wave 1” 13 CTSA sites are involved including Colorado,
Columbia, Emory, Harvard, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UCLA, UCSD, UCSF, U FL, U MN, U Pitt, UT
Southwestern.
Role: Co-lead for Informatics and DHWG
CDRN-1306-04912 (Rachel Hess) PCORI
01/01/14 - 06/30/15
A P2aTH towards a Learning Health System in the Mid-Atlantic Region
The P2aTH Clinical Data Research Network brings together four Mid-Atlantic Health Systems:
University of Pittsburgh/UPMC, Penn State College of Medicine/Hershey Medical Center, Temple
University School of Medicine/Temple Health, and Johns Hopkins University/ Johns Hopkins Health
System/ Johns Hopkins Health Care. In P2aTH, we will combine resources to follow a longitudinal
cohort of at least 1 million diverse individuals across a variety of health care settings to maximize our
power to conduct meaningful patient-centered outcomes research. Our vision is to develop a learning
health system that is jointly led by patients and providers.
Role: Grant-Coordinating Informatics Lead
124CA180921-01 (Crowley) NCI
09/25/13 - 07/31/18
Advanced Development of TIES-Enhancing Access to Tissue for Cancer Research Archived human
tissues are an essential resource for translational research. But access to these human tissues is often
a rate limiting factor in cancer research. We propose advanced development of the TIES software to (1)
increase institutional capacity for using FFPE to support molecular characterization of human tumors,
(2) increase access to tissues within cancer centers, and (3) improve the ability to share tissues and
associated phenotype data among cancer centers.
Role: Co-Investigator
1U01HL112707-01 (N. Kaminski)
04/01/12 - 12/31/14
NIH NHLBI
Sarcoidosis and A1AT Genomics & Informatics Coordinating Center
The Sarcoidosis and A1AT Genomics and Informatics Center (SAGIC) will facilitate this process by
addressing the following objectives for the NHLBI Genomic Research in A1AT and Sarcoidosis
(GRADS) program: 1) Coordination of Clinical Centers activities that include patient recruitment and
phenotyping and biospecimen collection. 2) Performance of transcriptome and microbiome analyses of
the samples obtained by the Clinical Centers, 3) Data analysis and integration, 4) Dataset preparation
for deposit in the NHLBI BioLINCC repository
Role: PI (multiple)
P50 CA121973-02 (John M. Kirkwood)
08/26/08 - 06/30/16
NIH/NCI
SPORE in Skin Cancer
The Melanoma and Skin Cancer SPORE Informatics Core provides clinical annotation, tissue banking
informatics, clinical trals management services and honest broker services to this translational
research effort.
Role: Core Director, Informatics Core
2P30CA047904-179029 (Nancy Davidson)
09/01/04 - 07/31/15
National Cancer Institute
Cancer Informatics Services
The University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute (UPCI) is a multidisciplinary cancer research center with
programs in basic research, translational research and clinical investigations. Dr. Becich directs the
Cancer Informatics Services (CIS). The CIS has been continuously funded as part of the Cancer Center
Support Grant (CCSG) funding for 11 yrs and the CCSG grant has been in place for 27 years.
Role: Core Director, Cancer Informatics Service
5T15LM007059-24 (Rebecca Crowley)
07/01/02 - 06/30/17
NIH NLM/NIDCR/NHLBI
Pittsburgh Biomedical Informatics Training Program
The major goals of this project are as follows: Provides funds to support a graduate training fellowship
program in medical informatics.
Role: Associate Director