Awards & Recognition

The Office of Data Sciences (ODS) is nationally recognized for advancing innovation at the intersection of data science and pediatric care, earning prestigious awards and competitive funding that both validates and enables its impact. These honors highlight ODS’s leadership in translating cutting-edge AI and data capabilities into meaningful clinical breakthroughs for children and families.

2026

Germain Accelerator Award: Heart Center Data Lake

In partnership with the Heart Center at Nationwide Children's, ODS has been awarded $600,000 over 3 years by the Germain Accelerator Program to construct a comprehensive Heart Center Data Lake. This award will support ODS's efforts to link its Data Lake strategic pillar with the Cardiac Outcomes Research by Application of Genomics (COURAGE for Kids) program—a prospective, genome-first initiative in critically ill congenital heart disease patients. The Germain Accelerator Program represents one of Nationwide Children's most prestigious research funding mechanisms, designating integrated research-clinical initiatives with a proven bench-to-bedside track record and a commitment to transforming patient care. Programs that have received this distinction share a common profile: multidisciplinary teams, deep integration of genomics into clinical care and a clear pathway from discovery to the bedside. The Heart Center Data Lake exemplifies all three. Uniting investigators and clinicians across ODS, genomics, cardiology and critical care, the program will build a secure, governed platform that integrates data from across the care continuum—including electronic health records, bedside physiologic monitoring, cardiac catheterization, advanced imaging (echocardiography, MRI, CT), rapid genome sequencing and social determinants of health—into a unified, harmonized resource purpose-built for research and clinical innovation. Anchored in the COURAGE for Kids cohort, the platform links genomic data with rich longitudinal clinical phenotypes to enable discovery at a scale and depth not previously possible in pediatric congenital heart disease.

By connecting these multi-modal data streams, the Heart Center Data Lake will accelerate precision medicine for the most critically ill pediatric patients—enabling genome-informed risk stratification, predictive modeling of surgical outcomes and complications and clinical decision support delivered directly at the point of care. The platform will also streamline data submission to major national registries including STS, PC4 and C-3PO, and will offer a natural-language query interface that puts complex cardiac data within reach of clinicians and researchers alike. Designed for collaboration, the data lake will support multi-institutional partnerships and open new avenues for externally funded research, positioning Nationwide Children's and the Abigail Wexner Research Institute as a national destination for genomics-enabled pediatric cardiovascular care.

2025

Gartner Eye on Innovation Award – Winner, Mid-Size Enterprise, Americas

In recognition of its innovative application of technology to address critical healthcare challenges, ODS was selected as the winner of the prestigious 2025 Gartner Eye on Innovation Awards for Mid-Size Enterprise for the Americas region.

This international honor recognized the Data Review & Evaluation Assistant for Mental Health (DREAM) initiative. Responding to the escalating pediatric mental health crisis, the DREAM project deploys cutting-edge generative AI to empower researchers at the nation’s largest Pediatric Behavioral Health program. The AI-powered tool democratizes access to vast, fragmented datasets, allowing researchers to uncover root causes and identify effective interventions for youth mental health without needing deep technical expertise. This recognition highlights ODS’s leadership in driving digital transformation and enhancing analytical capabilities to address the most pressing issues in pediatric care.

AWS Imagine Grant: Children’s Health Innovation Award

In September 2025, ODS was selected as a recipient of the 2025-2026 AWS Imagine Grant, receiving the Children’s Health Innovation Award. This $300,000 grant is dedicated to the clinical implementation of GENIUS, an AI-powered platform poised to revolutionize neonatal care.

GENUIS is designed to end long diagnostic odysseys for the most vulnerable patients. The platform identifies which infants in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) need rapid genome sequencing, automates the complex interpretation of genomic data and continuously re-analyzes past cases as new scientific discoveries emerge. Built on AWS and seamlessly integrated into the EPIC electronic health record system, the project aims to cut diagnostic delays by more than half and double the number of NICU patients who receive a definitive genetic diagnosis within two weeks of testing. This acceleration will directly improve patient outcomes, advance health equity and reduce avoidable healthcare costs.

NIH R21 Grant for Neonatal Genomic Medicine

Highlighting the translational potential of ODS's work, Dr. White and his colleague, Dr. Bimal Chaudhari, a neonatologist, were awarded a $434,500 R21 grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). The project, "NeoGx-III," will build upon the machine learning algorithm developed for the GENIUS initiative.

The grant will fund the development and validation of an advanced model that integrates both maternal and infant electronic medical records to predict the need for genome sequencing in Level III NICUs. By expanding this predictive tool beyond specialized children's hospitals, the project aims to vastly increase its impact, potentially reaching thousands more critically ill infants. A core goal of this work is to reduce health disparities by creating an objective, data-driven method for identifying at-risk newborns, ensuring that all children, especially those in underserved communities, have access to timely and life-changing genomic diagnostics.

2024

PrecisionFDA AutoML App-a-thon: Top Performer, Advanced ML Tier (2024)

In 2024, ODS won the Advanced ML tier of the precisionFDA Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) App-a-thon, a federal challenge designed to assess the power of open-source AutoML for biomedical research. ODS team delivered a secure, reproducible AutoML application that empowers domain scientists to build high-quality machine learning models without writing a single line of code – complete with the essential guardrails of governance, auditability and performance monitoring required in a clinical research environment.

The winning application was tested on two real-world biomedical challenges: accurately predicting survival outcomes for a brain-cancer genomics dataset and detecting sample swaps in a complex proteomics dataset from the National Cancer Institute. The success of the application in both discovery and data integrity tasks demonstrated its immediate translational impact. This achievement also earned ODS the prestigious ‘Team of the Year’ award from the Abigail Wexner Research Institute, a testament to the group’s rapid formation and remarkable accomplishments.

This achievement directly advances several core ODS strategies:

• Data Intelligence & Data Mastery: The AutoML application is a prime example of democratizing AI. It provides non-specialist researchers with powerful, accessible tools to extract insights from the data lake, advancing the goal of putting data science capabilities within reach of every researcher.
• Data Translation & Data Lake: By enabling researchers to safely and rapidly prototype predictive models against Nationwide Children’s Data Lake assets, the application accelerates the translation of data into clinically relevant findings.

This win, earned alongside industry leaders like IBM, validates ODS strategy of pairing robust data engineering with accessible tools. It also showcases the success of ODS “One Team” operating model—where data scientists, software engineers and researchers collaborate to deliver capabilities that accelerate discovery across all of pediatric medicine.

Abigail Wexner Research Institute Team of the Year Award

Data science is fast becoming the next revolutionary force in medicine, much like genomics was over the past decade. Looking back on the past year, the most profound accomplishment has been the formation of ODS team itself. Assembled quickly and tasked with an ambitious mission, their hard work and dedication have produced remarkable achievements in a very short time, culminating in the high honor of being named the research institute's 'Team of the Year.'

AWS Children’s Innovation Initiative Award

In a significant endorsement of its vision and capabilities, ODS was honored with a $1 million philanthropic commitment from Amazon Web Services (AWS) as part of the launch of the AWS Children’s Innovation Initiative (CI2). This four-year award is designed to empower leading nonprofit and healthcare institutions to advance pediatric causes through innovative uses of technology.

The award was announced in June 2024 at the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington D.C., highlighting a deep-seated collaboration between ODS and AWS. This substantial commitment will accelerate ODS’s work in leveraging AI and cloud computing to create transformative solutions in child healthcare. The initiative acknowledges ODS’s pivotal role in shaping the future of biomedical data science and its potential to drive the next wave of innovation in pediatric research and care.