Q&A: Indra Neil Sarkar Sees Many Roles for Biomedical Informaticians in Translational Medicine

For translational medicine to succeed, biomedical informaticians need to be part of the team, Indra Neil Sarkar from the University of Vermont's College of Medicine wrote in a paper published in the Journal of Translational Medicine in late February.

Sarkar, who is director of biomedical informatics in the university's Center for Clinical and Translational Science, said biomedical informaticians should be involved wherever translational barriers need to be surmounted, including support for clinical decision-making, standards development, and developing methods in natural language processing, information retrieval, and electronic health records.

BioInform spoke with Sarkar last week at the American Medical Informatics Association Summit on Translational Bioinformatics in San Francisco. He will be chairing next year's summit. The following is an edited version of that conversation.