Dr Sean Mooney Named Director of NIH Center for Information Technology

Sean Mooney, PhD, has been named director of NIH’s Center for Information Technology (CIT) by National Institutes of Health Director Monica M. Bertagnolli, MD. Dr Mooney is expected to join NIH in mid-March.

“Dr Mooney has spent his career developing effective and collaborative computing systems to support biomedical research. His background in bioinformatics and expertise in the implementation and governance of a multi-faceted research IT department make him particularly suited to lead NIH CIT,” said Dr Bertagnolli. “I look forward to welcoming Dr Mooney to the NIH leadership team and extend my gratitude to Ivor D’Souza who is serving as acting director of CIT following the retirement of former director Andrea Norris in September 2022.”

As CIT director, Dr Mooney will oversee an approximately $400 million portfolio that includes a world-renowned supercomputer that allows researchers to conduct large-scale data analyses; a state-of-the-art network that enables research across NIH and around the world; cloud-based services that give researchers a cost-effective way to access datasets and advanced computational tools and services; and the latest collaboration tools to promote flexibility and productivity. CIT collaborates with the NIH intramural community in computational bioscience, engineering, informatics and statistics to help make biomedical discoveries that protect and improve our nation’s health. Additionally, CIT provides IT infrastructure and IT services to support all of NIH.

Dr Mooney will join NIH from Seattle where he currently serves as a professor of biomedical informatics and medical education in the University of Washington (UW) School of Medicine. As part of this role, he also serves as Chief Research Information Officer, interim director for the UW Institute for Medical Data Science and director of informatics for the UW Institute of Translational Health Sciences. Originally trained in chemistry and informatics, Dr Mooney’s research interests focus on leveraging computational cyberinfrastructure and data science to enable discovery within biomedical research. His group at the University of Washington has supported research computing and investigator-led research projects.

Dr Mooney is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. He earned his bachelor’s in biochemistry and molecular biology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison; his Ph.D. in pharmaceutical chemistry from the University of California, San Francisco; and was the American Cancer Society John Peter Hoffman Fellow in the Department of Genetics and Stanford Medical Informatics. Before joining the faculty at the UW, he was an associate professor and director of bioinformatics at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. Prior to that, he was an assistant professor of medical and molecular genetics at Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis. Dr Mooney is active in the outdoors and has climbed Mt. Rainier and bicycled across the United States twice.

NIH CIT provides, coordinates and manages information technology, and advances computational science. CIT incorporates the power of modern computers into the biomedical programs and administrative procedures of NIH by focusing on three primary activities: conducting computational biosciences research, developing information systems and providing computer facilities.