Hal Collard, MD, MS, the Vice Chancellor for Research announced the appointment of Ida Sim, PhD, MD as UCSF’s first Chief Research Informatics Officer (CRIO), effective April 1.
In this role Dr. Sim will lead UCSF’s research informatics strategy and will work in close partnership with Associate Chief Information Officer for Research Mandy Terrill to advance a broad vision for the coming decade and beyond. Central to this is positioning UCSF at the forefront of technology-centric research, including artificial intelligence, computational science, and digital health. The CRIO role will support UCSF’s research informatics community across the spectrum — from basic science to clinical trials and health services research; from translational science to population health and health equity. In the CRIO role, Dr. Sim will report to the Vice Chancellor for Research.
As a Professor of Medicine, primary care physician, informatics researcher, and nonprofit entrepreneur, Dr. Sim brings a wealth of expertise and accomplishment to this important new role including recognition as a global leader in the technology and policy of large-scale health data sharing.
Dr. Sim is the UCSF Director of the UCSF UC Berkeley Joint Program in Computational Precision Health, and will be stepping down from the roles of Director of Digital Health for the Division of General Internal Medicine and Informatics Lead for UCSF’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute’s Informatics and Research Innovation program.
Additionally, Dr. Sim is a co-founder of Open mHealth, a nonprofit organization that is breaking down barriers to mobile health app and data integration through an open software architecture, and a co-found of Vivli, the world's largest data sharing platform for participant-level clinical trial data. In 2019, she co-developed CommonHealth, an open-source software suite bringing to the Android ecosystem the equivalent of Apple Health's ability to access and share EHR data. In 2005, she was the founding Project Coordinator of the World Health Organization's International Clinical Trials Registry Platform, where she led the establishment of the first global policy on clinical trial registration.
Dr. Sim is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and has served on multiple advisory committees on health information infrastructure for clinical care and research including committees of the National Research Council and National Academy of Medicine. She is a recipient of the United States Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, and a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation. Dr. Sim completed her undergraduate, graduate studies, and fellowship at Stanford University, and her residency at Massachusetts General Hospital.