Blanca E. Himes, PhD, ATSF

Associate Professor of Informatics

Dr. Himes’ research employs biomedical informatics approaches to gain insights into asthma pathogenesis and treatment. Her lab has performed i) genome-wide association studies of asthma and related traits as a lead investigator and as part of large collaborations, ii) identified and characterized subjects for asthma genomics studies using patient-derived data from electronic health records, iii) used RNA-Seq to study human airway smooth muscle responses to asthma medications, and to identify differences in response between cells derived from fatal asthma and health donors, and iv) leveraged the large volume of underutilized publicly available respiratory research data to identify novel hypotheses based on diseased-focused integration of diverse data types. 

Dr. Himes arrived at Penn in October 2014 as a recruit of the then-new Institute for Biomedical Informatics (IBI) and the department now known as DBEI. More information is available in her lab website.