The Faculty Database (FDB) is a centralized repository of information related to the professional and research activities of faculty, physicians, and staff within the biomedical and research communities of UCLA and the David Geffen School of Medicine.

The FDB is designed to allow distributed management of personnel data by departments, divisions, institutes, centers, labs, and individuals. It is a flexible relational database schema developed to feed data to dynamic public web site. Moreover the FDB is easily tailored to adopt presentations of faculty information that integrate precisely with department web servers. While the data are maintained in and served from the Portal the look and feel of the pages can be tailored to match the design of each department’s web sites. The administrative interface to these data consists of a set of pages that allow the department administrator to search for and edit all information of personnel within their department, division, institutes, and centers (i.e., groups).

Associations of personnel to groups are made via titles. In other words, a person has a title in a department; for example, Leonard Rome has the title ‘professor’ in the group (department) of Biological Chemistry, and this is what associates him to the department of Biological Chemistry. The data elements that the FDB supports include research interests specific to each affiliation, publication lists specific to each affiliation, academic degrees, awards, professional affiliations, photos, CV information, addresses, URLs, and phone numbers.

The department administrator can also edit address, description, phone, and photo data about his department and maintain lists of individuals associated with the department. Faculty members within the department can login to the FDB using their email and employee number and update their own information.

Currently the FDB is used by over 25 web sites for various departments, hospitals and centers. The FDB comprises 4873 personnel (3562 faculty, 2169 physicians). Approximately 1600 of those personnel have logged into the site to update their profiles.