Seventeen members of the College of Engineering faculty have become associated with the University of Iowa's Informatics Initiative.

Directing the initiative is Greg Carmichael, Karl Kammermeyer Professor of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering.

Engineering faculty members who are now associated with the initiative include Joe Assouline, Er-Wei Bai, Terry Braun, Tom Casavant, Hans Johnson, Dave Kristensen, Andrew Kusiak, Amaury Lendasse, Tim Mattes, Priya Pennathur, Joe Reinhardt, Mike Schnieders, Milan Sonka, Charles Stanier, Fatima Toor, and Gabriele Villarini.

"The Iowa Informatics Initiative is a bold, campus-wide initiative designed to foster new collaborations to open new research and scholarship opportunities across  campus from health care to digital arts and humanities, and to educate and train the next generation workforce with the skills to transform information into knowledge and actions," according to Carmichael.

"The Informatics Initiative is designed to strengthen the research and training capacities of these centers and clusters by adding new faculty with foundational and domain expertise, and to enhance the professional staff infrastructure to better support informatics activities and maximize the effective use of campus wide informatics resources," he added.

An Informatics Task Force was organized in the spring of 2013 with the charge of developing a comprehensive and cohesive action plan that strengthens informatics education, training, research and collaborative support at the University of Iowa. The task force found existing strengths in informatics-related educational and research in a number of areas distributed across campus. In addition, institutional strengths in the underlying infrastructure necessary to support informatics teaching and research were identified including a state-of-the-art data center and recent investments in the Helium/Neon computer systems.