James Tcheng, MD
Director, DTMI Biomedical Informatics Core
Professor of Medicine
Associate Professor in Community and Family Medicine

As Director of the DTMI Biomedical Informatics Core, Dr. Tcheng leads efforts to develop a community of faculty and staff involved in biomedical informatics across all departments, centers, institutes and schools at Duke; to provide scalable and adaptable informatics infrastructure to facilitate collaborative research across the clinical and translational research continuum and the integration of clinical and molecular data; and to develop strategies to leverage informatics capabilities to foster the practice of evidence-based medicine and to improve community health status.

Dr. Tcheng received his MD from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and completed a fellowship in cardiology at Duke. He is currently a Professor of Medicine and Associate Professor of Community and Family Medicine. He serves as both Medical Knowledge Architect for the Duke University Health System (DUHS) and Information Architect for the Duke Heart Center. He is Vice Chairman of the American College of Cardiology Informatics Committee and a member of the Cardiovascular Medicine Work Group of the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology. He is the author of 171 peer reviewed manuscripts and 18 book chapters.

Dr. Tcheng has been responsible for the development, deployment, management, and regulatory compliance of the medical knowledge content incorporated and embedded in information technology solutions of DUHS. This includes assessment, interpretation, creation, representation and vetting of published evidence and guidelines as well as complementary clinical content developed and produced by other clinical resources and content experts. He has also led the evaluation of and reporting about the design, implementation, impact, utility, and value of information technology solutions and systems with respect to best practice solutions, patient safety, patient outcomes, and institutional processes.

Jessica Tenenbaum, PhD
Associate Director for Bioinformatics, DTMI Biomedical Informatics Core

Dr. Tenenbaum facilitates translational research through coordination and support of bioinformatics infrastructure. She provides project management for the data storage and analysis aspects of the MURDOCK study, and contributes bioinformatics area expertise to strategic software licensing and technology partnerships for both the DTMI and the Biomarker Factory.

Dr. Tenenbaum received her PhD in Biomedical Informatics from Stanford University. Her doctoral research focused on integration and analysis of disparate “-omic” scale datasets, and mining publicly available data for insights into human disease. Other research interests include proteomics, regulatory and signaling networks, systems biology, and human-computer interaction. As a Science Policy Fellow at the Institute of Medicine in Washington, DC, she helped to organize the Roundtable on Evidence-Based Medicine and assisted in early planning stages for a workshop on health information technology.

After earning her bachelor’s degree in biology from Harvard University, with a focus on computer science, Dr. Tenenbaum worked as a program manager at Microsoft Corporation in Redmond, WA for six years. She first worked on the website product Sidewalk.com (later bought by Citysearch), and subsequently, on Smartphone devices in the Windows Mobile division. She also taught evening courses in computer programming through the University of Washington Extension School.

Meredith Nahm, MS
Associate Director for Clinical Research Informatics, DTMI Biomedical Informatics Core

Ms. Nahm provides oversight and coordination of clinical research informatics projects undertaken by the Core, including DTMI's provision of infrastructure for clinical research data collection and management. She also oversees informatics for the MURDOCK community registry and the Duke Clinical Research Unit, as well as involvement in national efforts to develop and implement data standards. Additionally, Ms. Nahm supports efforts to advance the application of informatics capabilities to enhance medical practice. Through her work and associated collaborations, Ms. Nahm helps to shape Duke's Clinical Research Informatics strategy and direction.

Prior to her appointment as the Associate Director for Clinical Research Informatics, Nahm served as the Director of Clinical Data Integration at the Duke Clinical Research Institute 2001 and has been with the DCRI since 1998. She has over fifteen years of experience in clinical research informatics and quality control.

Ms. Nahm has held numerous industry leadership roles, including serving as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Society for Clinical Data Management (SCDM), Chair of the SCDM Good Clinical Data Management Practices (GCDMP) Committee, Chair of the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) Industry Advisory Board, and the data management content expert for the NIH-sponsored National Leadership Forum for Clinical Research Networks.

Ms. Nahm authored the GCDMP sections on Measuring and Assuring Data Quality and has played a leadership role in data standards development and implementation efforts. She is currently working with the data standards development efforts in Cardiology and Tuberculosis on two NIH Roadmap projects, and the Data and Statistical Center for the National Institute on Drug Abuse Clinical Trials Network. She is a frequent presenter at industry meetings, and publishes in the clinical trial operational literature. Her research interests include quantitative evaluation of common clinical data management practices and data quality. She received undergraduate and masters degrees in Nuclear Engineering from North Carolina State University.