Biomedical Research Informatics Center (BRIC)

The Nemours Biomedical Research Informatics Center (BRIC), formerly the Bioinformatics Core facility, provides consultation, training and computational resources (both hardware and software) to Nemours Children's biomedical research investigators from both Delaware and Florida.

BRIC is located at the Nemours Children’s Hospital, Delaware in Wilmington, Delaware. The main facilities in Rockland Center I occupy about 1,000 square feet of workspace on two adjacent floors including four offices, one workstation cubicle and a shared conference room equipped with videoconferencing capability. An additional 273-square-foot computer and network facility room is maintained in the Administration and Research Building. BRIC is wheelchair accessible and barrier-free.

Current Research Group

• H. Timothy Bunnell, PhD, Director
• Christopher Pennington, MS, Systems and Database Manager
• Daniel Eckrich, MLIS, Supervisor, Research Applications
• Suzanne M. McCahan, PhD, Assistant Research Scientist
• Cara Reedy, PhD, Research Data Scientist
• Eileen Antico, Research and Reporting Analyst
• Helen Williams, Research and Reporting Analyst
• Michael Peck, Web Developer

Services offered by the Nemours Biomedical Research Informatics Center (BRIC) include:

• Experimental design of parallel, crossover, longitudinal, cross-section and microarray studies
• Data mining of microarray studies
• Generalized statistical analysis
• EHR and PEDSnet data requests and analysis
• Development of special purpose software and applications

BRIC also maintains a variety of computational resources to support big data, speech analysis and genomics projects, as well as a large number of user-defined clinical research databases.

The Nemours Biomedical Research Informatics Center (BRIC) aids in the development and maintenance of projects both internal and external to Nemours, including but not limited to:

• PEDSnet
• N3C
• Precision Medicine

Web applications hosted and maintained by BRIC include:

• REDCap
• Atlas
• SNAP/RSP (Scientist Networking and Profiling/Research Services Portal)
• CTET (Clinical Trial Effort Tool)

Software, Languages, Resources and Tools utilized by BRIC include:

• Software: SPSS, SAS, R, Bioconductor, MeV
• Programming Languages: Python, PHP, PERL, C, C++, Objective C, Unix Shell, Javascript
• Databases and Technologies: MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL, REDCap, i2b2, Wordpress, JQuery, HTML, XML, JSON