San Diego Supercomputer Center Hosts New SDSU Portal for Minority Healthcare

Published March 22, 2024

By Kimberly Mann Bruch, SDSC Communications

For the past decade, Rodrigo Valdez has been working on an array of software and web development projects – most recently concentrating his efforts with a team at San Diego State University (SDSU) to develop a portal that provides health science data related to minority healthcare. The portal, coined HealthLINK Center Health Science Research Portal (HSRP), has been developed by Valdez and a team at SDSU in conjunction with the Hubzero team at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego.

“We have been really pleased with our work with the SDSC team to help us lower the barrier to health science data,” Valdez said. “This portal provides users with an array of population-based minority research data that can be utilized for biomedical, behavioral and clinical services.”

SDSC Project Manager Claire Stirm, Senior Software Engineer Nick Kisseberth and the Hubzero team have been working with Valdez on providing portal customization for role-based management.

“To ensure that various types of users and professionals can easily access materials on the HSRP portal while respecting role-based access, we have worked with Valdez and the SDSU team to enhance the Hubzero resources so they are curated to a specific access group,” Stirm said. “It is exciting to see the user community grow, and the resources grow on HSRP.”

The portal encompasses an online repository to catalog, share and archive scholarly, training and research-related resources in support of minority health and health disparities research. HSRP also features sharable technical reports, lab and field protocols, surveys, analytic code, data models, data sources, training materials, research webinars and mentorship information.

“HSRP users not only have the chance to learn from varied sources, but they too can be a contributor to the scientific community by sharing their research and findings,” Valdez said. “Thanks to the help of our colleagues at SDSC, HSRP users have easy access to seminars, courses and teaching materials that have been created by contributors with expertise in various fields.”