Research at Fox Chase »Research Facilities »Mathematical & Computational Sciences

Eric A. Ross, PhD Associate Member and Senior Director of Academic Informatics Facility Director

510 Township Line Road 3rd Floor 215-728-2891 215-728-2720 Eric.Ross@fccc.edu

Function

The Population Studies Facility (PSF) supports research conducted by peer-review funded investigators at Fox Chase by providing them access to a team of skilled information systems professionals. The PSF provides informatics support services to Fox Chase investigators conducting large and complex studies from a wide spectrum of disciplines (e.g., biostatistics, behavioral medicine, chemoprevention, oncology, genetic epidemiology, molecular epidemiology, nursing research, outcomes research, virology). PSF personnel have substantial expertise with state-of-the-art software engineering and design as they are applied to cancer research. The PSF functions include development of databases for the storage and manipulation of large quantities of questionnaire, clinical, and specimen data; client server and Web enabled electronic data entry and retrieval systems; report generation software; consistency and quality control systems; and statistical software. This facility also provides data entry services.

Description

Currently, the majority of the database management systems developed by the PSF use the relational database product Oracle as the primary software platform for data entry and validation, storage, retrieval, modification, and security. The software developed and supported by the PSF run on a distributed computing system consisting of multiple RISC computers running the Solaris operating systems.