New Informatics Research Lab Established for Doctoral Program in Public Affairs

Beginning this fall 2004, public affairs’ doctoral students will have new research capabilities, using the field of informatics and a dedicated computer lab open around-the-clock.

Thomas Wan, professor of public affairs, health services administration and nursing and the new director of the Doctoral Program in Public Affairs, brought his expertise in informatics to the college when he joined in August 2003. He has since initiated interdisciplinary informatics research and will mentor future students.

“Before informatics research, [decision-making] was often based on trial and error,” Wan said. “You need some kind of evidence-based principle to guide your practice.”

Informatics is the study of the application of computer and statistical techniques to the management of information. This involves creating and storing vast amounts of data (data warehousing), using machine-learning algorithms to find buried or hidden patterns within the databases (data mining) and using the integrated data to build a model to be used for decision-making in the future.

Originally used in the biological sciences to analyze, for example, the massive amounts of data from the human genome project, informatics has expanded to fields such as health care or criminal justice, both of which are tracks within the Doctoral Program in Public Affairs.

Health-care informatics is part of a research project already begun by Wan, public affairs’ Research Associate Dr. Jackie Zhang and Assistant Professor Lynn Unruh of the Program in Health Services Administration. The project focuses on nurse staffing and nursing care quality in nursing homes in the United States and tremendous amounts of data need to be analyzed.

The Public Affairs Informatics Research Lab, located at the Institute of Simulation and Training (IST) in the Central Florida Research Park, will house the computer servers, data and software, where use of this technology will make future students “highly marketable with this research capability,” according to Wan.

For more information on informatics and the Doctoral Program in Public Affairs, please contact Thomas Wan at twan@mail.ucf.edu.