Eric B. Durbin, DrPH, MS, has been selected to serve as interim division chief for biomedical informatics in the University of Kentucky College of Medicine Department of Internal Medicine, effective September 17, 2025.
Dr. Durbin is an associate professor and serves as the director of the Kentucky Cancer Registry. He is a principal investigator of the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Program of Cancer Registries (NPCR) programs in Kentucky. He also serves as director of the Cancer Research Informatics Shared Resource at the Markey Cancer Center and as co-director of the Biomedical Informatics Core of the UK Center for Clinical and Translational Science (CCTS). He serves on two state boards focused on pediatric cancer research and colorectal cancer screening.
Dr. Durbin has over three decades of experience in population-based cancer surveillance and biomedical informatics support for basic, clinical, population, and translational cancer research. As an advocate for biomedical data standardization, integration, and use, he has established one of the most mature and comprehensive cancer surveillance infrastructures in the United States.
Kentucky leads the nation in population-based electronic pathology reporting and is the first state cancer registry to routinely collect clinical molecular test results. Dr. Durbin leads UK’s efforts to expand participation in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) sponsored National Clinical Cohort Collaborative (N3C) to include data for cancer and kidney disease and is also leading UK’s participation in the NIH Data Collect Once Use Numerous Times (COUNTS) initiative.
To facilitate research into the high burden of childhood cancer in Kentucky and Appalachia, he established the Appalachian and Inner City Pediatric, Adolescent, and Young Adult Cancer Data Ecosystem (ACCELERATE) Consortium, a unique data sharing initiative that brings together leading cancer centers treating patients in the Appalachian region. As an internationally recognized leader in population cancer surveillance, he was elected to serve as president of the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries, beginning in July of this year.
Dr. Durbin’s current research focuses on the integration of multi–omics data to support strategic planning and decision-making in precision medicine and in cancer prevention and control. His research team develops informatics methods to support population-based cancer research and machine learning methods to derive biomarkers and features from narrative clinical documents and pathology digital whole slide images.
He also leads epidemiological studies exploring environmental, genetic, and other risk factors associated with the high incidence of childhood brain and central nervous system tumors in Kentucky and the Appalachian region.
Dr. Durbin earned degrees in biology and computer science from Transylvania University and UK and his doctorate in epidemiology from the UK College of Public Health.