David R. Holmes III, Ph.D., studies the methods by which health care researchers analyze and interpret large data sets. Health-related data is constantly being collected through the digitalization of medical records and the concordant interest in personal health monitoring. Because of this wealth of information, health care data makes up significant sectors of the big data industry, including in-hospital sensing, clinical reporting, medical imaging and home-based wellness.

Health care data is large, diverse and often incomplete, and is difficult to analyze and interpret. Dr. Holmes is investigating new methods, which attempt to link disparate data sets and build computational models directly from the data.

Research into data representation, signal processing, graph analytics and machine learning is yielding new and novel insight into basic biology and human health. To match the complexity of these algorithms and the magnitude of data, Dr. Holmes also studies the mapping of health care questions onto novel computational architecture.