Umit Topaloglu, Ph.D.

As Chief of the Clinical and Translational Research Informatics Branch, I oversee the biomedical informatics efforts for several NCI clinical research endeavors, including the NCI Precision Medicine Initiatives, the Clinical Trials Reporting Program, and the strategic roadmap development.

I’m also responsible for oversight of NCI’s Semantic Infrastructure (i.e., NCI Enterprise Vocabulary Services and the Cancer Data Standards Registry and Repository), which is crucial to enabling standards-based data sharing, real world evidence, and cancer research. Additionally, I provide data science expertise for these programs and collaborate closely with bioinformatics and data ecosystem initiatives.

Publications

• Applying FHIR Genomics for Research—From Sequencing to Database. 2022 AMIA Informatics Summit, 2022.
• Risk and Outcome of Breakthrough COVID-19 Infections in Vaccinated Patients with Cancer: Real-world Evidence from the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C). ASCO Journal of Clinical Oncology, 2021.
• Natural Language Processing and Recurrent Network Models for Identifying Genomic Mutation-associated Cancer Treatment Change from Patient Progress Notes. JAMIA Open, 2019.

Background

Education

• Ph.D., Applied Science, University of Arkansas at Little Rock
• M.S., Electrical Engineering, Cukurova University (Turkey)
• B.S., Electrical Engineering, Cukurova University (Turkey)

Previous Work

• Co-Director, Bioinformatics Shared Resource, Wake Forest University School of Medicine 
  (WFSoM)
• Associate Lead, Informatics Program, Wake Forest Clinical and Translational Science 
  Institute, WFSoM
• Associate Director, Center for Biomedical Informatics, WFSoM
• Associate Professor, Cancer Biology and Biostatistics and Data Science Departments, WFSoM
• Associate Director of Informatics, Wake Forest Baptist Comprehensive Cancer Center, WFSoM