John DiPalazzo has been a research analyst at CIPHR since 2018, and has worked in software-development and database roles at MaineHealth and elsewhere since 1997. Prior to his technical career, he was a newspaper journalist for 15 years.

Since starting at CIPHR he has worked on the Maine Cancer Genomics Initiative, a statewide collaboration to understand how genomic sequencing of cancer patients’ tumors affects cancer care.

He helped to implement MaineHealth’s instance of the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) Common Data Model (CDM) database, which allows the research institute to participate in an international research network of health databases, and has championed its use by MaineHealth researchers.

He completed a dual master’s degree program in statistics and public health at University of Southern Maine in 2018. His graduate research looked at ethical dilemmas posed by the use of genomic data, and he participated in the Jackson Laboratory’s NIH-funded program on genomic big data. He holds bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and computer science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.