Research Leadership

Clinical Sciences Research Pathway Leader: Patrick Flume, M.D., is a Professor and Endowed Chair in the Departments of Medicine and Pediatrics. Dr. Flume has a long history of success in performing and leading large clinical trials in cystic fibrosis, bronchiectasis, and non-tuberculous mycobacteria pulmonary infections. He is Director of the MUSC CF Center, Director of the MUSC Therapeutic Development Network (TDN) research site (consistently in the top three performing centers in the network), and has served as a site Principal Investigator in >100 multi-center clinical trials and as the overall PI in >10 trials including the Standardized Treatment of Pulmonary Exacerbations in CF (STOP Program) funded by the CF Foundation. He has led the Pulmonary Clinical Trials Program for the last 10 years, providing supervision to a program that manages an average of 50 active studies at any given time. Many of his prior trainees have continued onto successful research careers in CF.

Dr. Obeid is a Professor and SmartState Endowed Chair in Biomedical Informatics in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC). Dr. Obeid is a pediatrician who was formally trained in Medical Informatics at the Division of Health Sciences and Technology, a joint Harvard-MIT fellowship program.

He served as the Associate Director of the Biomedical Informatics Center (BMIC) for over a decade where he led the development of several academic and operational research informatics initiatives including the electronic health records (EHR) Research Data Warehouse (RDW), REDCap, and many others. Since his arrival at MUSC, he has served as principal investigator, co-investigator, and informatics leader on numerous federally funded projects. At the national level, he led several working groups related to translational research informatics. Dr. Obeid is the founder and director of two courses in Biomedical Informatics (MCR-746: Informatics and Data Management for Clinical Research and BDSI-712: Translational Informatics).

His research interests include artificial intelligence (AI), specifically, deep learning and large language models applications using EHR data for e-phenotyping and predictive modeling with focus on clinical text mining. Other research interests include natural language processing, electronic consents, secondary use of EHR data/data warehousing, and biomedical ontologies.

Dr. Obeid is the co-founder of the AI Hub at MUSC. He serves as the director of the Cancer Integrated Data Enabled Resource (CIDER), which integrates a variety of multimodal data, and provides several services to researchers including, consultations, feasibility queries, brokered access to integrated data, and AI and NLP research services.

Besim Ogretmen, Ph.D., is a professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the SmartState Endowed Chair of Lipidomics and Drug Discovery. An internationally renowned investigator, Ogretmen has over 25 years of experience in cancer research, specializing in the field of lipid signaling and metabolism. In his associate director role, Ogretmen integrates fundamental discoveries across multiple discipline areas, helping to accelerate translational advances into the clinic. His overall goal is to improve survival outcomes of cancer patients by developing collaborative/team science-based research projects between basic and clinical researchers.