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November 13, 2018

Rockefeller University Hospital Team Explores Collaboration Opportunities with Cornell Tech
By Roger Vaughan, MS, DrPh

On July 24, 2018, Barry Coller, MD, Rhonda Kost, MD, Jonathan Tobin, PhD, Roger Vaughan, MS, DrPH, Rita Devine, MPA, RN, Harry Grossman, MBA, Riva Gottesman, MPA, RHIA, and Donna Brassil, MA, RN, CCRC went to the Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island to meet with Associate Dean and Professor of Computer Science at Cornell Tech, Deborah Estrin and JP Pollak, PhD, Senior Researcher-in-Residence. Dr. Estrin, who also holds an appointment as a Professor of Public Health at the Weill Cornell Medical College, and Dr. Pollak were eager to share the academic activities at Cornell Tech Campus and learn how they could benefit from collaborations with Rockefeller University Hospital researchers.

Cornell Tech is a revolutionary model for graduate education that fuses technology with business and creative thinking. When fully completed, the campus will include two million square feet of state-of-the-art buildings, over two acres of open space, and will be home to more than 2,000 graduate students and hundreds of faculty and staff.

It was clear that there were multiple opportunities for synergistic collaborations, as each Cornell Tech student will need to complete a data project, and the unique nature of many of the Rockefeller research projects could benefit from novel analytic interrogation and descriptive approaches.

Two concrete steps emerged after that summer meeting:

• There was a follow up meeting with Cornell Tech professor of Operations Research and Information Engineering, Nathan Kallus, to review a menu of data projects ongoing at Rockefeller University Hospital that might serve as candidates for analytic collaborations. Dr. Kallus distributed these potential projects to Cornell Tech faculty; some appropriate for short term masters student projects, some more appropriate for PhD students, while others likely Post-doctoral fellow/faculty projects.

• Director of Biostatistics at Rockefeller University, Dr. Roger Vaughan, will teach a course on Health Services Research on the Cornell Tech campus as part of a degree requirement for Cornell Tech students in the Spring of 2019. Dr. Vaughan’s teaching role will provide an excellent source of ongoing inter-institutional communication to identify opportunities for collaboration.