Our Story

“The PHICOR team remains dedicated to further advancing the field of systems science and utilizing systems approaches to tackle major problems in our country and around the world, collaboratively.”

Back in 2003, I approached some leading cardiologists with the idea of using computer models to help guide the placement of cath labs.

Cath labs, short for catheter labs, are where cardiologists can perform life-saving procedures for people experiencing heart attacks and other urgent cardiac problems. Many lower income neighborhoods and rural areas did not have the same access to such services as higher income neighborhoods. My thought was that a computer model could identify where cath labs should be established in a way that would provide more equitable access for everyone. The cardiologists scoffed at the idea and said, “We decide where to place cath labs and not some computer mumbo jumbo.” This was well before people talked more regularly about artificial intelligence (AI) and other such computer-aided approaches. Back then if you said AI, people first thought of Allen Iversen.

The cardiologists weren’t the only ones to show skepticism towards such computer-aided approaches at the time. Early on in my academic career, which commenced after I had worked in the business and start-up worlds,

I encountered a lot of skepticism in the health and public health worlds about things that weren't more traditional epidemiology, clinical trial, or basic laboratory science work.

Plus, several very senior faculty members kept saying that in academics it’s important to choose a single disease or a single body part and focus on that for the rest of one’s career. While our world does need people who have such focus, such an approach didn’t work for me. One of the joys of my career has been the opportunity to try different things and span different areas from computer science to economics to journalism to health and public health. Moreover, health and public health problems are rarely body-part or discipline-specific. Instead, they are the results of broken systems, which can’t be fixed by simply staying within the silo of a discipline. Yet, I felt that there was a lack of opportunities for those who wanted to actually address these systems.

Seeing the lack of opportunities for those who wanted to do computer/AI and systems work prompted me to establish PHICOR in 2007, while I was an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. In the ensuing six years, our PHICOR team grew and grew. Our team occupied “The Annex '' in the University of Pittsburgh and included high school students, college students, graduate students, post-docs, and different staff members. We did a variety of work in many different areas. During the 2009 H1N1 Influenza Pandemic, our team was embedded in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, using computer modeling to help with the national response. We worked on different ways of controlling healthcare-associated infections and the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria, including our work with CDC’s SHIELD and PROTECT projects. Our team also traveled the world, working in places like Niger, Benin, Senegal, Chad, Kenya, Mozambique, Thailand, Vietnam, and India. These projects have included working with various Ministries of Health and major international organizations such as UNICEF, Gavi, Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), Medicins Sans Fronties (MSF) otherwise known as Doctors Without Borders (MSF), PATH and the World Health Organization (WHO).

In 2013, I was recruited to Johns Hopkins University and moved our PHICOR Team to Baltimore, Maryland. There, our PHICOR Team built and ran the Global Obesity Prevention Center (GOPC). For over eight years, the GOPC’s mind-meld of faculty, staff, students, and other personnel was dedicated to developing and utilizing systems approaches, methods, and tools to address obesity and other non-communicable diseases (NCDs). The GOPC’s work spanned in over 20 countries, accounted for over 200 publications in peer-reviewed journals, and implemented real world impact that influenced policy.

Then starting in 2018, a couple major academic institutions in New York City began recruiting me. I took this as signs from the Universe that PHICOR’s next destination should be The Big Apple and all the unique opportunities that this amazing city would bring. Eventually, we chose to move PHICOR to the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy in late 2019, just in time for the COVID-19 pandemic. Once we got there, we were quickly immersed in COVID-19 pandemic work. Our team developed models to help decision makers better understand a wide variety of issues ranging from better understanding the burden of COVID-19 to the development and implementation of different COVID-19 policies and interventions such as vaccination, treatment, and non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). The PHICOR Team’s COVID-19 modeling work and results garnered significant attention from the media. For example, in February 2021, The New York Times adapted one of our models to develop an interactive tool to help readers estimate when different levels of herd immunity may be achieved. In July 2021, The New York Times worked with our PHICOR team to publish an interactive map to visualize county-level immunity against the delta variant across the entire U.S. We also established a new CUNY Center, CATCH (Center for Advanced Technology and Communication in Health), with a mission to develop and implement new technologies and communication approaches to help inform decision making in health and public health. In 2021, our PHICOR Team began building the AIMINGS Center, which is supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and serves as the AI Center for the NIH’s Nutrition for Precision Health (NPH) Consortium.

Staying true to our original mission from the early days in Pittsburgh, the PHICOR team remains dedicated to further advancing the field of systems science and utilizing systems approaches to tackle major problems in our country and around the world, collaboratively. If you look at our years of work, you can see we’ve been working directly with decision makers to make a positive impact on our society. There is still much more to be done, and we are not stopping anytime soon.

Regards,

Bruce Y. Lee, MD, MBA
Executive Director and Founder, PHICOR
Executive Director, AIMINGS and CATCH
Professor, City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy
Senior Contributor, Forbes
Regular Contributor, Psychology Today
Minded by Science newsletter