?BERD The Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design (BERD) KCA of the Delaware-CTR ACCEL has been success- ful in meeting the original Specific Aims: providing consultations across ACCEL institutions, providing educational forums, developing methods, and supporting the Big Data Pilot grants. BERD has skilled, experienced epidemiolo- gists, biostatisticians, bioinformaticians, and biomedical informaticians forming a critical mass of scientists to sup- port clinical and translational projects. This success has been fostered by close collaboration across the four current ACCEL partner institutions: The University of Delaware (UD), the Nemours/Alfred I. DuPont Hospital for Children (Nemours), Christiana Care Health System (CCHS), the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC). We look forward to welcoming Delaware State University (DSU) to BERD as part of this renewal. Each ACCEL institution has organizational programs with expertise in epidemiology, biostatistics and bioinformatics, MUSC has an established CTSA, the South Carolina Clinical and Translational Research Institute (SCTR). ACCEL in general and BERD in particular have collaborated closely with SCTR. BERD also functions closely with the Value Institute (VI) at CCHS, and the newly established Biomedical Research Infor-matics Center (BRIC) at Nemours. The VI is an innovative research institute for studying healthcare delivery as well as translational research. BRIC is a team of bioinformati- cians, data scientists, and developers formed in response to the expanding need for a bridge facility between research and clinical informatics. In addition, UD and DSU both have considerable infrastructure and expertise in bioinfor- matics. The scientists at the BRIC, SCTR, VI, UD and DSU add to the overall strength of ACCEL and BERD in further developing infrastructure and the critical mass of investigators to support projects of importance concerning health and healthcare in Delaware. BERD has also collaborated closely with the other ACCEL KCAs and a number of BERD scientists are members of multiple KCAs, promoting component interconnectedness.
The Specific Aims of BERD are to: 1: Provide consultative services for clinical, translational and population health sciences at ACCEL institutions. Consultative services include epidemiology, biostatistics, research design, data management, and bio- and medical informatics. 2: Develop new, innovative, and quantitative methods in biostatistics, epidemiology, and bioinformatics. 3: Foster a learning environment through educational offerings in BERD scientists? areas of expertise. 4: Leverage the deep biomedical informatics and bioinformatics resources across the ACCEL institu-tions to support new and extended research projects addressing critical healthcare needs in Delaware. We are well-positioned to provide such support, building on the successful infrastructure established over the first AC-CEL award period, including develop- ing external collaborations with multiple IDeA-funded centers, becoming an integral part of large-scale external data networks such as PEDSnet and NIH Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K), and internally funding Big Data interdisciplin- ary pilot grants.
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