Blanca Himes is the Associate Professor in the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics and received tenure as an Associate Professor of Informatics in 2020. She serves as Associate Director of the Integrative Health Sciences Facility Core of the Center of Excellence in Environmental Toxicology, where she leads efforts to assist local investigators who wish to conduct studies on exposed populations via analysis of geospatially distributed data and use of portable pollution sensors.
Her work has focused on using biomedical informatics approaches to study pulmonary diseases, especially asthma. She began asthma genetics and pharmacogenetics research by participating in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) as a lead investigator and as part of large collaborations.