Jessie Tenenbaum

Chief Data Officer, North Carolina DHHS
Opening Remarks

Jessie Tenenbaum serves as the Chief Data Officer (CDO) for DHHS, assisting the Department in developing a strategy to use information to inform and evaluate policy and improve the health and well-being of residents of North Carolina.

Prior to taking on the role of CDO, Tenenbaum was a founding faculty member of the Division of Translational Biomedical Informatics within Duke University’s Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics. Her research applies expertise in data standards and electronic health records to stratify mental health disorders to enable precision medicine. She is also interested in ethical, legal and social issues around big data and precision medicine. Prior to her faculty role, Tenenbaum was Associate Director for Bioinformatics for the Duke Translational Medicine Institute, with a focus on data standards and enterprise data warehousing.

Nationally, Tenenbaum is a member of the Board of Directors for the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and plays a leadership role in AMIA’s Committee on Women in Informatics. She is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Biomedical Informatics and serves on the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Library of Medicine. She also serves on a number of editorial and advisory boards including Nature Scientific Data and Briefings in Bioinformatics.

After earning her bachelor’s degree in biology from Harvard University, Tenenbaum was a Program Manager at Microsoft Corp. in Redmond, Wash., for six years before pursuing a PhD in biomedical informatics at Stanford University. As a 2006 Science Policy Fellow at the National Academy of Medicine (then the Institute of Medicine), she helped to organize the first Roundtable on Evidence-Based Medicine and assisted in early planning stages for a workshop on health information technology.

Tenenbaum is a strong promoter and advocate of young women interested in in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) careers. She volunteers in local schools to teach programming to elementary school students and volunteers with Triangle Women in STEM to plan annual STEM Day events for girls.

Jessie Tenenbaum