by Rachel Bailey — last modified 2009-06-08 14:18
Informatics Leaders Join SHIS
To help further advance the success of the research and strategic vision of The University of Texas School of Health Information Sciences at Houston (SHIS), two of the nation’s top informatics leaders and their team have joined the school. The recruitment of Vimla Patel, PhD, DSc, and Edward Shortliffe, MD, PhD, will help SHIS to establish the world’s number one team of cognitive informatics researchers, and strengthen the school’s role as one of the leading biomedical informatics programs.
“We are extremely pleased to have Drs. Patel and Shortliffe join our faculty. They are international leaders in our field,” said Jack Smith, MD, PhD, Dean of The University of Texas School of Health Information Sciences at Houston, “For example, both have been instrumental in creating and nurturing the field through their involvement in biomedical informatics related organizations and publications, as well as their involvement in the design and implementation of biomedical informatics curriculum.”
The husband-and-wife team of Shortliffe and Patel come to Houston from Arizona where they both worked for Arizona State University (ASU) and the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Phoenix in partnership with ASU. Both are fellows of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI), bringing SHIS to a total of 6 Fellows. Shortliffe, who once served as president of ACMI, was also the 2006 recipient of their Morris F. Collen Award, the highest honor of lifetime achievement in biomedical informatics. He is considered by many as one of the major founders of the field and is an editor of the leading textbook, Biomedical Informatics: Computer Applications in Health Care and Biomedicine, which defines the field as a scientific discipline.
Patel is a world-renowned researcher in applied cognitive science and biomedical informatics. She, and long time collaborator, Jiajie Zhang, PhD, Dr. Doris L. Ross professor and associate dean for research at The University of Texas School of Health Information Sciences at Houston, have worked closely for more than ten years through numerous research grants, publications, and presentations.
They will be joining forces to establish and direct the Center for Cognitive Informatics and Decision Making, creating the world’s leading team in this area.
In addition to a group of postdoctoral fellows and doctoral and master’s students, another key team member moving to Houston is Trevor Cohen, MD, PhD. Cohen became an assistant professor of biomedical informatics at ASU after completing his doctoral training at Columbia University’s Department of Biomedical Informatics. Three junior faculty members in the areas of social networking, information visualization, and cognitive biomedical linguistics are also being recruited to the Center. Current SHIS faculty, Todd Johnson, PhD, associate professor and associate dean for academic affairs, and Hongbin Wang, PhD, associate professor, will join as core faculty. Two leaders in the emergency medicine department at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston, Chair Brent King, MD, and Vice Chair David Robinson, MD, will be clinician associates with the Center. Research in medical decision-making, medical error, models of real world collaborative decision-making in health care, human-centered computing, surgical simulations for research and training, and cognitive and neural foundations for decision-making and learning will be the focus.
“Dr. Patel pioneered cognitive research in our field,” said Zhang, “she almost single-handedly started the cognitive program in the biomedical informatics community, and grew it into a major area of study.”
Patel’s early vision of this research is now fully on the national agenda and best reflected by the National Research Council’s report on health information technology that identified cognitive support for clinicians and patients as one of the most important factors for its success. A significant portion of President Obama’s $19 billion stimulus package directly relates to health information technology and its implementation into health care. The addition of Patel’s expertise coupled with Zhang’s extensive research in this area will optimize the school’s ability to go after opportunities brought forth by the stimulus package.
During her time in Arizona, Patel was professor and vice-chair of ASU’s Department of Biomedical Informatics and the director of the Center for Decision Making and Cognition in the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering. She was also a professor of basic medical sciences at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Phoenix.
Prior to Arizona, Patel was a professor of biomedical informatics and psychiatry at Columbia University, where she still holds an adjunct professor position. She was also the director of the Laboratory of Decision Making and Cognition at Columbia Medical School. Before that, she was a professor of medicine and psychology at McGill University in Montreal where she directed the Center for Medical Education and the McGill Cognitive Science Center .
Born in Fiji, Patel received her undergraduate degree from Otago University in New Zealand. She then went on to receive her master’s and doctoral degrees from McGill University in Canada. Patel also earned an Honorary Doctor of Science degree from the University of Victoria, BC, Canada.
Throughout the course of her career, Patel has covered many areas of cognitive informatics and decision-making. She initiated the use of cognitive science methods and theories in research pertaining to medical problem solving. She worked extensively in the area of medical error reduction in emergency care and critical environments, and in the area of lay health cognition in diverse socio-cultural contexts. Patel also studied risk-taking behavior and sexual decision- making as it relates to HIV in youth and adolescents. Her expertise brought her to work for many national and even global agencies, such as the World Bank, the World Health Organization (WHO), Unicef, and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).
Patel is an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (elected by the Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences) and The New York Academy of Medicine. In 1999, she received the Swedish “Woman of Science” award. Patel is an associate editor of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics, has authored more than 250 publications, and has been on the editorial board of several other health science and informatics journals.
Shortliffe, whose professional interest revolves around research, medical education and training in biomedical informatics, was most recently a professor at ASU. When he first moved to the state in 2007, he assumed the role of founding dean of the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix.
Canadian-born Shortliffe received his undergraduate degree from Harvard College, and his PhD and MD from Stanford University. Shortliffe was the principal developer of MYCIN, one of the first rule-based artificial intelligence systems. It was designed to obtain clinical data from a physician and was used to diagnose and recommend treatment for severe infections. Although MYCIN was never applied to practice because of its inability to integrate into patient records and physician workflow, it proved to be very accurate and helped launch the future development of similar systems, therefore furthering the use of information technology in medicine.
Following his education and internal medicine house-staff training at Stanford, Shortliffe joined Stanford's internal medicine faculty. There he served as chief of general internal medicine, associate chair of medicine for primary care, and director of an active research program in clinical information systems and decision support. He also spearheaded the formation of a graduate degree program in biomedical informatics.
Shortliffe then went on to become a professor and chair of Columbia University’s Department of Biomedical Informatics where he played a key role in its success. He more than doubled the size of the department’s faculty, expanded research areas and training, and helped to nurture the development of Columbia's role as a National Center of Excellence in Biomedical Computation.
In July of 2009, Shortliffe will become President and CEO of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), a professional biomedical and health informatics organization with thousands of members. He is also an elected member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians, and the American Clinical and Climatological Association. He is a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and a Master of the American College of Physicians. He has authored more than 300 articles and books, and is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics.
“With the addition of these two highly distinguished faculty and their team to the school,” said Smith, “we are continuing our strategy of making SHIS the leading innovator in biomedical informatics, and expanding our expertise across the many sub-specialties that are becoming increasingly important to the field. The school is a formidable competitive force in research, education, and service in biomedical informatics.”
by Rachel Bailey
[ 本帖最后由 南京猿人 于 2009-6-9 12:07 编辑 ] |
发表于 2009-6-9 12:05:12
发表于 2009-6-13 11:42:09
