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Ph.D. In PHI Collaborative Partners
Creating Unique Research Opportunities

The Personal Health Informatics Doctoral Program incorporates an experiential learning component with curricular components that immerse students in Boston’s top medical and healthcare institutions. The goal is to provide insightful experiences observing patient-centered problems and identifying and solving problems from the patient’s perspective. Students will work individually and in teams, often studying at-risk populations of urban residents. This immersion will inform research and provide foundational experiences for students in careers where they will be expected to work on problems with transdisciplinary teams. They will be expected to approach problem solving using both technology and a thorough understanding of the health and behavioral theories that support the work.

We are partnering with internationally-recognized programs at some of the local research centers and faculty will work with students to identify additional partners based on the student’s research interests.

Current Partners

Center for Connected Health
Founded in 1995 by Harvard Medical School teaching hospitals, the Center for Connected Health develops new strategies to move health care from the hospital and doctor’s office into the day-to-day lives of patients. Leveraging information technology — cell phones, computers, networked devices and simple remote monitoring tools — the Center helps providers and patients manage chronic conditions, maintain health and wellness, and improve adherence, engagement and clinical outcomes. The Center evaluates new technologies and programs and develops and executes feasibility studies and randomized controlled clinical trials. It has generated over 100 scholarly publications and helped over 30,000 patients.

Center for Community Health Education Research and Service (CCHERS)
CCHERS was established in 1991 as a partnership between Northeastern University Bouvé College of Health Sciences, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston Medical Center, and Boston Public Health Commission and 14 community health centers in the city. CCHERS provides community-based education and service learning experiences for health professions students and conducts research into health issues that impact inner-city communities and urban populations. Capitalizing on the existing relationship between Northeastern University and the community health centers in the city, one community health center, the South End Community Health Center serves as a source to reach out to the Latino population in Boston. The IUHR mission is to improve the health of urban populations by generating knowledge that informs health policies, disease prevention programs and health services. It also enhances the university’s efforts in recruitment of minority faculty and students and those living in medically underserved areas to the graduate program.

Research Funding and Collaborations

Personal Health Informatics researchers are presently funded by the following organizations:

  • The National Institutes of Health (NCI, NHLBI, NLM, NIA, Genes and Environment Initiative)
  • The National Science Foundation
  • DHHS/HRSA
  • CIMIT
  • Industry
  • Nancy Lurie Marks Family Foundation
  • Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
  • Simons Foundation
  • Boston University SPH seed grant
  • Northeastern University seed grants

Personal Health Informatics researchers have ongoing collaborations with a variety of research organizations and universities. See the the research project list for more information. Examples include the Boston Medical Center, Boston University, Duke Medical School, Georgia Tech, Groden Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MD Anderson Cancer Research Center (Houston), Stanford Medical School, Tufts Medical School, University of Southern California Medical School, and many more.