Austin, TX – 14 April 2016 - The Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) is pleased to announce the addition of Dr. Lauren Becnel as Senior Director of Biomedical Informatics and Alliances. Dr. Becnel has over 10 years of experience in biomedical informatics and research IT with seven years of experience specifically leading large, diverse technical teams and a high performance research computing center at Baylor School of Medicine. In her new role at CDISC, Dr. Becnel will focus on informatics technologies, especially the CDISC metadata repository, Shared Health and Research Electronic Library (SHARE), which houses all of the CDISC standards. She will ensure that CDISC research standards are relevant not only for regulated research but also for academic research centers and precision medicine, working at the intersections of clinical research, translational research and healthcare.
“We are delighted to welcome Dr. Becnel to the CDISC Leadership Team”, stated Dr. Rebecca Kush, CDISC President and CEO. “Lauren brings value to the CDISC organization and our global community as an experienced technologist with expertise in biomedical informatics. She will no doubt contribute significantly to achieving the CDISC strategic goals and aspirations to bring a siloed research community together through standards, enabling smarter research and improved learning from health care”.
Prior to joining CDISC, Dr. Becnel served as Baylor College of Medicine’s Assistant Professor, Departments of Medicine, Hematology/Oncology Section, and Molecular and Cellular Biology. Dr. Becnel served as the Director of Biomedical Informatics Group at the Dan L. Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center’s Co-director of the Biostatistics and Informatics Shared Resource. In that role, Dr. Becnel provided biomedical informatics expertise to a myriad of basic, translational, clinical and epidemiological studies. For the past four years, she has served on the Steering Committee of the collaborative BRIDG Translational Research Domain Analysis Model (CDISC, HL7 and ISO, NCI and FDA), which harmonizes the CDISC Foundational Standards; she will now assume leadership of that Committee.
Dr. Becnel has served as Principal Investigator and/or IT Director on dozens of grants and federal contracts, including national clinical trials, internationally utilized basic sciences databases, national data sharing initiatives, as well as national and statewide cancer biobanks. She is already working with CDISC on a number of grant proposals to ensure diversified funding and CDISC sustainability.
About CDISC
CDISC is a 501(c)(3) global non-profit charitable organization that streamlines research and enables connections to healthcare through the development of clinical research data standards and workflow enablers. CDISC has developed a suite of standards to support clinical research from protocol through analysis and reporting, including therapeutic area specific standards for over 25 disease areas. CDISC standards make it possible for data to speak the same language, empowering simple data collection and private sharing that makes the most of the valuable information offered by patients participating in research studies around the globe. Using CDISC standards from the start of studies enables Smarter Research to Unlock Cures, accelerating study start-up time by 70-90% and saving ~60% overall in terms of time and resources to conduct research. CDISC is the patient’s advocate, transforming medical product development and various types of clinical research.
