Opinion: Big data biomedicine offers big higher education opportunities

I like to tell my students a story about a time back in the “olden days” of the early 1990s when I was a newly minted postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Our laboratory conducted brain imaging studies using positron emission tomographic imaging and would routinely obtain 6–12 functional image volumes per subject in our experiments. The director of our neuroimaging laboratory asked me to explore the purchase of a new computer hard drive capable of storing our growing collection of brain imaging data files. At that time, we had already accumulated quite a number of subjects and wanted to easily access their data for a variety of different statistical analyses—and we expected to obtain much more data.