A Brief History

Leaf was created by Nic Dobbins, PhD, Assistant Professor of biomedical informatics & data science at Johns Hopkins University, and formerly the Principal Solutions Architect at UW Medicine Research IT. Leaf began as a simple experiment to recreate the power of cohort discovery tools like i2b2, but with the ability to query any database structure, and with a friendly, intuitive user interface.

Since then, Leaf has grown into an institutionally-supported research tool integral to biomedical research at the University of Washington, and was released to the public domain as open-source software in spring 2019.

Team Members

Nic Dobbins maintains Leaf. Leaf was co-developed by Cliff Spital, now at UW Web Services. Sean Mooney former Chief Research Information Officer of UW Medicine and Professor of Biomedical Informatics & Medical Education, was Leaf's faculty champion.

At UW, Leaf has been a successful cohort discovery tool with hundreds of active users. We believe Leaf is a strong component to an ongoing culture change in research computing.

Leaf Governance Committee

The multi-institutional Leaf Governance Committee was created in 2019 to foster networking and collaboration across CTSA hubs. The committees aim is to support growth, to steer enhancements and oversee governance of the Leaf user community. The committee members are top in the Research Informatics field from institutions across the nation. Please learn more about each member by visiting here.

Have questions for the committee? Please ask us here!