Mooney Joins NIH to Head CIT

Dr. Sean Mooney has been selected as director of the Center for Information Technology (CIT). He joins NIH this month.

Mooney specializes in bioinformatics and has expertise in implementing and governing a multi-faceted research IT department. He has spent his career developing collaborative computing systems to support biomedical research.

As CIT director, Mooney will oversee an approximately $400 million portfolio that includes a world-renowned supercomputer allowing researchers to conduct large-scale data analyses; a state-of-the-art network that enables research across NIH and around the world; and cloud-based services offering a cost-effective way to access datasets and advanced computational tools and services. 

CIT collaborates with the NIH intramural community in computational bioscience, engineering, informatics and statistics to help make biomedical discoveries. Additionally, CIT provides IT infrastructure and IT services to support all of NIH.

Mooney joins NIH from Seattle where he served as a professor of biomedical informatics and medical education at the University of Washington (UW) School of Medicine. 

As part of this role, he served as chief research information officer, interim director for the UW Institute for Medical Data Science and director of informatics for the UW Institute of Translational Health Sciences. 

Originally trained in chemistry and informatics, Mooney’s research interests focus on leveraging computational cyberinfrastructure and data science to enable discovery.