Charles Schmitt, Ph.D.

Over my career, my work has focused on developing and applying computer technologies to support research efforts, primarily in the domains of clinical, translational, and basic biomedical research. Much of this work has focused on building computer systems and cyberinfrastructures to acquire, process, manage, and analyze research data and to turn that data into useful knowledge.

The Office of Data Science (ODS), which I direct, was established to assist NIEHS and Environmental Health researchers in promoting FAIR+ principals for research data. The FAIR+ principals call for data to be findable, accessible, interoperable, reproducible, and computable. ODS staff work across multiple projects, collaborations, and communities of practice towards this goal. ODS projects have included a focus on: extracting knowledge from unstructured sources, principally literature; helping promote the development and adoption of data and metadata standards; building data systems to help researchers in accessing toxicology and climate change and health data; and more recently in applying natural language processing techniques and large language models to help guide research efforts and priorities.

I received a B.S. degree in in Physics in 1989 and a Ph.D. in computer science in 1999, both from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My work career has been split in three parts. My early career was in industry where I worked for several companies with a focus on software engineering, data analysis, and data mining in multiple domain areas prior to joining BD Technologies where my work shifted to developing biomedical data management and analysis platforms in support of stem cell research. I later joined the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) where I created and led their biomedical informatics group and their data science group, served as PI, Investigator, or Key Personnel on multiple NIH, NSF, and DHS grants, and served as Chief Technology Officer. I began working at the NIEHS in 2017.