Researcher | Research Overview
Dr. Bosl’s primary research focus is in clinical neurophysiology and neurodiagnostics. Projects to discover patterns in infant EEG signals that can serve as biomarkers for autism, neurocognitive effects of complex trauma, and other neurodevelopmental pathologies continue with collaborations at BCH in Developmental Medicine and Psychiatry. A proposal to move this work to the bedside was awarded support by the BCH Innovation & Digital Health Accelerator award. Bill is working with Tobi Loddenkemper in the BCH Epilepsy clinic to find measures of ‘epileptigenicity’ or tendency to have epileptic seizures, and on a crowd-sourcing approach to annotation of clinical EEGs for research. Other funded projects involve neurodevelopment in premature infants (Rutgers), development of a very early intervention for neural impairments associated with autism (University of Texas San Antonio Medical Center), and development of a prototype infant EEG device for primary care use (with Quantum Applied Science and Research). He also works with colleagues at Oxford on the emergence of neurological impairment in Kenyan children following cerebral malaria (with the Kenya Medical Research Institute). Clinical applications for all of this work will require integration of EEG-derived information with other patient data in the EHR, and presentation to clinicians, topics that are being developed with Ken Mandl.
Researcher | Research Background
Dr. Bosl is currently Visiting Associate Professor of Pediatrics at HMS and Visiting faculty with CHIP. He is also an Associate Professor of Health Informatics, Clinical Psychology, and Data Science at the University of San Francisco, where he was the founding director of the Master’s degree program in Health Informatics.
Before beginning research in neuroscience and biomedical informatics at BCH, Dr. Bosl was a computational physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and trained in computational geophysics (Stanford PhD). As a researcher with Stanford University he invented a method for computing properties of porous materials from CT scans, which led to the commercialization of new technology that is currently replacing laboratory core analysis globally.
He joined the Boston Children’s Hospital Informatics program in 2005 to begin research on neural development. Although initially looking at molecular models of neurodevelopment, his focus shifted to the pragmatic matter of finding digital biomarkers for atypical neurodevelopment using approaches that could potentially be implemented in primary care settings. His approach to biomarker discovery integrated his previous background in nonlinear physics and signal processing.
While at Boston Children’s Hospital, he also undertook additional graduate training in developmental neurobiology and neurotechnology (MIT) and completed a second PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience at Boston University School of Medicine (2016). The focus of his dissertation was on information technology for monitoring neurodevelopment and digital biomarkers for detection of atypical neurodevelopment. In 2013 he took on the role of Director of a new graduate program in health informatics at the University of San Francisco (USF). Although this position required considerable administrative effort initially, in 2017 Dr. Bosl renewed his research affiliation with Boston Children’s Hospital (visiting faculty) and Harvard Medical School (Visiting Associate Professor), specifically to facilitate collaborative research with faculty in behavioral medicine, neurology, and computational health informatics.