Eric Kasten, Ph.D.

Dr. Eric P. Kasten is an Assistant Professor, Director of the Biomedical Research Informatics Core (BRIC), and Associate Director of the Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CTSI).  As director, Dr. Kasten supervises the operations, outreach, and research activities of a team of more than 20 employees, including system administrators, software developers, data managers, project coordinators and research faculty.  CTSI supports both domestic and international projects by providing research support to MSU investigators for data management, data security, and analysis of research data. As part of his responsibilities at BRIC, he is a co-investigator on an award that funds a CDC data coordinating center supporting the largest federally funded epidemiological study in the US to help identify factors that might put children at risk for autism.  He oversees the implementation and operation of the secure systems and services that support activities such as statistical analysis, geocoding to support exposure analysis, and high performance computational analysis of human genetics data. In collaboration with the High Performance Computing Center, he shepherded the creation of a cluster of compute nodes, which met federally mandated security requirements, to support high performance analysis of genetic data.  He is the primary author and provided oversight for the implementation of the system security plan required for the data coordinating center to achieve FISMA compliance and receive an authorization to operate from the CDC. Dr. Kasten is also a co-investigator and team member for the Flint Registry.  In support of the registry, he provides consultation and coordination of BRIC services on system and data security, computer systems, and data analytics.  In collaboration with ecologists, Dr. Kasten has studied methods for processing and analysis of environmental acoustics for census of vocalizing animals and characterization of the soundscape to support monitoring and interpretation of terrestrial ecosystems.

His current research interests focus on the design of algorithms for biomedical and ecological informatics, bioinformatics, evolutionary computation, computational linguistics, natural language processing, bioacoustics, autonomous decision making in software, digital image analysis and understanding, and sensor technologies for automated monitoring of environments and ecosystems. Prior to receiving his Ph.D. degree, Dr. Kasten enjoyed a diverse career designing, implementing and deploying many different types of computer systems and software.  He has practical experience using software engineering techniques to design and implement software systems and algorithms for sensor platforms and data acquisition and analysis systems to support science, environmental and human health research.