Dr. Tenenbaum, founding faculty member of the Division of Translational Biomedical Informatics within the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, has been named as the Chief Data Officer for the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (NCDHHS). As the Chief Data Officer, Dr. Tenenbaum will develop strategies to use information to inform and evaluate policy and improve the health and well-being of residents of North Carolina. She will maintain her faculty appointment and affiliation while she takes on this influential role for the state. Her research applies expertise in data standards and electronic health records to stratify mental health disorders to enable precision medicine. She is also interested in ethical, legal and social issues around big data and precision medicine. Prior to her faculty role, Tenenbaum was Associate Director for Bioinformatics for the Duke Translational Medicine Institute, with a focus on data standards and enterprise data warehousing.
Nationally, Tenenbaum is a member of the Board of Directors for the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and plays a leadership role in AMIA's Committee on Women in Informatics. She is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Biomedical Informatics and serves on the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Library of Medicine. She also serves on a number of editorial and advisory boards including Nature Scientific Data and Briefings in Bioinformatics.
After earning her bachelor’s degree in biology from Harvard University, Tenenbaum was a Program Manager at Microsoft Corp. in Redmond, Wash., for six years before pursuing a PhD in biomedical informatics at Stanford University. As a 2006 Science Policy Fellow at the National Academy of Medicine (then the Institute of Medicine), she helped to organize the first Roundtable on Evidence-Based Medicine and assisted in early planning stages for a workshop on health information technology.
Tenenbaum is a strong promoter and advocate of young women interested in in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) careers. She volunteers in local schools to teach programming to elementary school students and volunteers with Triangle Women in STEM to plan annual STEM Day events for girls.
