Blanca E Himes, PhD
For over ten years, my work has focused on using biomedical informatics approaches to study pulmonary diseases, especially asthma. I began asthma genetics and pharmacogenetics research by participating in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) as a lead investigator and as part of large collaborations. Although promising loci were identified via these studies, I realized that translation of findings into insights that would have an impact on understanding disease pathophysiology, particularly in diverse populations, was a difficult challenge that required novel research strategies. I have addressed this challenge by leveraging my background in biomedical informatics to generate novel genome-scale datasets and to integrate novel and publicly available datasets using creative approaches. I have studied response to β2-agonists and glucocorticoids, commonly used asthma drugs, by obtaining and integrating omics-level data corresponding to in vitro and human studies. I have also used Electronic Health Record (EHR)-derived data to understand characteristics of real life populations with asthma and COPD, incorporating social, economic and environmental factor data obtained from secondary sources. Such data is helpful to address health disparities that are not easily characterized using traditional approaches.
I completed my undergraduate degree in physics from UCSD, and a Ph.D. in medical physics and bioinformatics from the Division of Health Sciences and Technology at MIT. Subsequently, I was a biomedical informatics research fellow at the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program under the guidance of Zak Kohane and Scott Weiss. In 2010, I became a faculty member of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School at the rank of Instructor, and I was promoted to Assistant Professor at these same institutions in 2013.
I moved to the University of Pennsylvania in 2014 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics and received tenure as an Associate Professor of Informatics in 2020. I serve as Associate Director of the Integrative Health Sciences Facility Core of the Center of Excellence in Environmental Toxicology, where I lead efforts to assist local investigators who wish to conduct studies on exposed populations via analysis of geospatially distributed data and use of portable pollution sensors. I am a member of the Graduate Group in Epidemiology and Biostatistics and the Graduate Group in Genomics Computational Biology.