Summary The University of Zurich together with the University Hospital of Zurich are embarking on a concerted effort to develop informatics programs to advance biomedical research and healthcare using cutting edge computational approaches. As part of these efforts, the newly created Chair of Medical Informatics will establish a research group that will investigate topics in clinical data science and translational bioinformatics, such as knowledge discovery from Big Data sources (Electronic Medical Record), development of Natural Language processing, information retrieval and extraction routines, as well as the analysis of human Omics data.