The mission of the Institute for Future Health is to help people better manage their health and quality of life using continuous monitoring and personalized, timely advice.

The Institute for Future Health, an innovative collaborative campus effort, has been approved as an official organized research unit (ORU) by the UCI Office of Research.

The effort is led by Director Ramesh Jain, PhD, computer science professor, and Associate Director Amir Rahmani, PhD, assistant professor at the UCI Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing and the Department of Computer Science.

Its mission is to help people better manage their health and quality of life using continuous monitoring and personalized, timely advice.

The institute is a major effort to bring together researchers, community health workers, medical and mental health practitioners, nurses, patients and patient advocates to work together on preventive cybernetic health, the use of data to prevent disease.

Using data in this way can guide individuals toward a healthy lifestyle in real time.

Research, translation happen at the same time

A unique concept in the institute will be its living laboratories, which allow for research and translation with people in real-life settings, to occur simultaneously.  Analyzing health data cannot happen in an artificial setting, the proposal states. It must happen in real time with data from people as they lead their normal lives.

The IFH seeks to integrate lifestyle, community, environment and socioeconomic factors with clinical knowledge to transform health systems into the hands of the individual.

Institute’s three-year goals

IFT’s first three-year goals are to:

  • Develop a number of multi-investigators or center-level grants
  • Write several collaborative books, journal articles or book chapters involving multiple IFH faculty, students or postdocs
  • Build collaborative research programs with international research organizations
  • Partner with companies to deploy technology products

Steering committee

The steering committee comprises leaders in research, technology and healthcare:

  • Tom Andriola, Vice Chancellor, Information Technology and Data
  • Nakia Best, Assistant Professor, Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing
  • Bernadette Boden-Albala, Professor, Director and Founding Dean, Program in Public Health
  • Charles Boicey, Chief Innovation Officer, Clearsense LLC
  • Jessica Borelli, Associate Professor, School of Social Ecology
  • Daniela Bota, Associate Professor, Vice Dean of Clinical Research, School of Medicine
  • Sara Brown, HS Assistant Clinical Professor, Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing
  • Hung Cao, Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
  • Michael J. Carey, Professor, Department of Computer Science
  • Qi Alfred Chen, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science
  • Nikil Dutt, Distinguished Professor, Department of Computer Science
  • Daniel Epstein, Assistant Professor, Department of Informatics
  • Charless Fowlkes, Professor, Department of Computer Science
  • Sergio Gago, Assistant Professor of Teaching, Department of Computer Science
  • Lisa Gibbs, Clinical Professor, School of Medicine
  • Yuqing Guo, Associate Professor, Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing
  • Afshan Hameed, Clinical Professor, School of Medicine
  • Gillian R. Hayes, Professor and Vice Provost for Graduate Education
  • Alison Holman, Professor, School of Nursing
  • Mahtab Jafari, Professor, Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences
  • Michelle Khine, Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering
  • Jung-Ah Lee, Associate Professor, Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing
  • Lisa Levitt, Lecturer and Digital Health Consultant, School of Business
  • Marco Levarato, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science
  • Zhou Li, Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
  • Karen Lindsay, PhD, RN, School of Medicine
  • Sara Mednick, Associate Professor, School of Social Sciences
  • Sharad Mehrotra, Professor, Department of Computer Science
  • Bin Nan, Professor, Department of Statistics
  • Ariana Nelson, Associate Clinical Professor, School of Medicine
  • Adey Nyamathi, Distinguished Professor and Founding Dean, Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing
  • Jung In Park, Assistant Professor, Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing
  • Daniel Parker, Assistant Professor, Program in Public Health
  • Melissa Pinto, Associate Professor, Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing
  • Tianchen Qian, Assistant Professor, Department of Statistics
  • Annie Qu, Professor, Department of Statistics
  • Uma Rao, Professor, School of Medicine
  • Margaret Schneider, Associate Director and Director of Evaluation and Pilot Studies, Institute for Clinical and Translational Sciences
  • Sanghyuk Shin, Assistant Professor, Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing
  • Ping H. Wang, Professor, School of Medicine
  • Kai Zheng, Associate Professor, Department of Informatics