The Master’s Degree in Informatics for Digital Health is open admission and offers courses taught in English to enhance the attractiveness to international students and to provide all participants with a “vocabulary” aligned with the needs of the (global) job market. The area of education will focus on Digital Health, specifically on methodologies, principles, foundations, and technical skills of Computer Science, considering that data management and processing (to produce information and then knowledge) plays and will play an increasingly significant role in the systematic and systemic transformation of the complex “health value” chain – which includes, among others, monitoring, diagnosis, treatment, wellness, care – and research in the biomedical, pharma, wellness/wellbeing, sports, and nutrition sectors.

The professional profile

The goal is to train professionals who have a critical understanding, knowledge, and skills (in terms of design, implementation, evaluation, experimentation, prototyping, and valorization) of computer science methodologies and technologies for studying and solving complex and interdisciplinary problems that arise in the field of health, pharma, nutraceuticals, wellness, and sports, with the aim of improving the quality of offerings and services (also in the context of a smart hospital), the efficiency and effectiveness of the results achieved, focusing on the personalization of care, assistance, monitoring, evaluation, and valorization of the patient, or more generally, of the user of all ages. In this educational context, particular attention is given to offering training on the entire “software stack” (from infrastructure to interfaces) for the development of applications and platforms that must be integrated, interoperable, resilient (in cloud, but not only), distributed, secure, robust, scalable, intelligent, and predictive; and, on the other hand, capable of managing a huge amount of heterogeneous (multi-modal) data collected from citizens-patients-assisted-users-athletes, both in person and remotely.

A defining element of the new Master’s degree is the presence of multi/interdisciplinary courses that provide students not only with the necessary computer science competencies and knowledge to achieve the “professionalism” required in the Digital Health sector but also with full awareness of the specificities, needs, and methodologies of this sector. A distinctive feature of the Master’s degree is the close collaboration (co-teaching) between professors in the computer science area and colleagues/professionals in the bio-medical, pharma, bio-engineering, and economic-legal sectors. Moreover, each course will include significant laboratory activity on state-of-the-art SW libraries and domain-specific data. The program will conclude with a targeted educational activity involving the analysis, design, and implementation of Digital Health applications in which students will engage in the development of software projects proposed by faculty and professionals in the biomedical sector, which may be further explored in their thesis work.

Equally important for graduates of this Master’s degree is the opportunity to take the “Esame di Stato” for the qualification to practice as an engineer (Ingegnere sezione A).

International advisory board

Another distinguishing feature of the degree program is the presence of an internationally recognized Advisory Board, comprising representatives from organizations, companies, universities, and venture capitalists. Their role will be to represent the stakeholders, serve as an authoritative reference for identifying the significant developments in this sector, and establish contacts (including international ones) for student internships, thereby providing valuable educational opportunities (projects, internships, placements) and an active job placement service. Currently, the members of the Advisory Board include:

1. Giovanni Cioni, Direttore scientifico IRCSS Fondazione Stella Maris, Pisa
2. Cosimo Comella, Reparto tecnologie digitali e cybersicurezza del Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali
3. Angelo Croatti, Responsabile per la Transizione Digitale dell’Azienda USL della Romagna
4. Marco De Pasquale, Product Marketing Manager Health & Medical Equipment Division, Samsung Electronics Italia
5. Luigi Doveri, Delegato startup e innovazione dell’Unione Industriale Pisana, e Presidente Red Lions S.p.A., Pisa
6. Luca Foschini, President of Sage Bionetworks, USA
7. Chiara Maiorino, Ecosystem Lead for Italy, EIT Health
8. Maurizio Mangione, CTO Fondazione Monasterio, Pisa
9. Cecilia Mascolo, Professoressa, University of Cambridge, UK
10. Emanuele Neri, Preside della Scuola Medica, Università di Pisa
11. Andrea Paolini, Direttore Generale, Fondazione Toscana Life Sciences
12. Luca Pinello, Professore, Massachusetts General Hospital e Harvard Medical School, USA
13. Corrado Priami, Prorettore per la Valorizzazione della Conoscenza, Università di Pisa 
14. Nicola Redi, Managing Partner, Obloo Ventures, Italia
15. Hannah Teichmann, MedRA Srl

The provisional list of free choices courses is:

• Optimization for health care systems
• Natural Language Processing for Digital Health applications
• Virtual Worlds
• Assistive technologies
• Formal and hybrid methods for medical imaging
• Numerical computing in biomedicine

The following courses can be taken from other degrees:

• 3D Geometric Modeling & Processing (WIF-LM)
• Computational models for complex systems (WIF-LM)
• Computational neuroscience (WBE-LM)
• Continual learning (WIF-LM)
• ICT Infrastructures (WIF-LM)
• Information retrieval (WIF-LM)
• Introduction to Quantum Computing (WIF-LM)
• Laboratory on ICT Startup Building (WIF-LM)
• Peer to peer systems and blockchains (WIF-LM)
• Robotics (WIF-LM)
• Scientific and large data visualization (WIF-LM)
• Scalable distributed computing (WIF-LM)
• Wireless networks (WTW-LM)
• Biology of the Cellular Systems (WBH-LM)
• Cell signaling and imaging tools (WBH-LM)
• Omics: Biotechnology and AI for Health (WBH-LM)
• Metagenomics (WBH-LM)
• Biometrics systems (WCY-LM)