Pota

POTA

Investigator Bradley M. Hemminger, Ph.D

The EPA has elevated the importance of the Center's role in performing outreach and translation activities (POTA). Our center created, as a complement to our research programs, an equally important functional area, integrated into the research, for deploying bioinformatics technologies into the environmental community; our Translation Group. It is understood that the field of bioinformatics, as defined within the Center, is broad in scope and is changing rapidly with discoveries in science and advances in information technologies. The benefactors of the Center are equally diverse in their needs to understand the application and implications of this cutting-edge science to resolving critical environmental issues. The EPA has identified potential benefactors of the center's research that span policy-makers, the public and other stakeholders, and science professionals.

Context for POTA activities

We see a key to the success of the Center is to provide an environment that assists the community in evaluating and incorporating new information and experiences into their problem solving process, and not just providing a portal if information.

Objectives

Develop and implement a Knowledge Management strategy that focuses on improving the process of using information and expertise.
Lead changes in the community by implementing a push-pull strategy for identifying critical needs and innovative methods for addressing environmental issues.
Develop and implement community-based and maintained, efficient gather and dissemination capabilities, based on existing or near-term technologies.
Foster a culture of sharing through the deployment of collaborative technologies.
Implement an education process for enabling non-specialists and professionals alike to effectively use the results produced through the Center.

POTA team is led by Dr. Bradley Hemminger who received his BA magna cum laude in mathematics and computer science from Vanderbilt University, the MS in computer science from UNC at Chapel Hill, and doctorate in computer science from the University of Utrecht. He brings experience as a senior research associate in the department of Radiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is currently an associate professor in the School of Information and Library Science, and head of the Informatics and Visualization Laboratory in the school. He has been a member of ACM and IEEE, and ACR and served on several standards committees. He has been an investigator on over 15 NIH/NSF/DOD grants.