Blanca Himes

Dr. Blanca E. Himes is an accomplished biomedical informatician with over 15 years of experience in research, teaching, mentorship, and administration. She currently guides the development and execution of NHLBI’s strategic vision for data science. 

Dr. Himes earned a B.S. in Physics, with a specialization in Computational Physics, from the University of California San Diego, and a Ph.D. in Medical Physics and Bioinformatics from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. She completed her postdoctoral studies at Harvard Medical School, where she was a Biomedical Informatics Research Fellow in the Boston Children's Hospital Informatics Program. Her early academic career continued at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital, where she received an NIH Pathway to Independence (K99/R00) award from the NHLBI. 

Dr. Himes joined the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics in 2014, where she went on to serve for more than a decade, becoming a tenured Associate Professor of Informatics. Her research there and throughout her career has centered on data science approaches — spanning omics techniques, electronic health records, biobanks, and large social and environmental datasets — to advance understanding of asthma and other pulmonary diseases. 

Over the course of her career, Dr. Himes has published more than 125 papers in peer-reviewed journals, authored five book chapters, and edited one book, and she has been invited to present her work at national and international meetings. She has mentored more than 80 students and fellows, including three Ph.D. students, eight postdoctoral fellows, ten master's degree students, and 41 undergraduate students. She left her faculty role at the University of Pennsylvania in December 2025 to take up her current position at NHLBI.