Scientific Advisory Board

Jill P. Mesirov, PhD, Chair
Olivier Bodenreider, MD, PhD
Rex Chisholm, PhD
Charles P. Friedman, PhD
Stanley Huff, MD
Eric Miller
Alan L. Rector, MD, PhD
Bedirhan Üstün, MD
Peter Lyster, PhD, Ex Officio

Jill P. Mesirov, PhD, Chair

Chief Informatics Officer
Director, Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Program
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

Dr. Jill Mesirov is director of the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Program and Chief Informatics Officer at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. She is also a member of the MIT Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and adjunct professor of bioinformatics at Boston University.

Dr. Mesirov is a computational scientist who has spent many years working in the area of high-performance computing on problems that arise in science, engineering and business applications. Her current research interest is computational biology with a focus on algorithms and analytic methodologies for pattern recognition and discovery with applications to cancer genomics, genome analysis and interpretation, and comparative genomics. In addition, Dr. Mesirov is committed to the development of practical, accessible software tools to bring these methods to the general biomedical research community.

In 1997, Dr. Mesirov came to the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research, now part of the Broad Institute, from IBM where she was manager of computational biology and bioinformatics in the Healthcare/Pharmaceutical Solutions Organization. Before joining IBM she was director of research at Thinking Machines Corporation for 10 years. She has also held positions in the mathematics department at the University of California at Berkeley, the Institute for Defense Analyses, and as associate executive director of the American Mathematical Society. Dr. Mesirov is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, director of the International Society for Computational Biology, former president of the Association for Women in Mathematics and serves on numerous academic and corporate scientific advisory and journal editorial boards.

Olivier Bodenreider, MD, PhD

Staff Scientist
The Lister Hill Center
National Library of Medicine

Dr. Olivier Bodenreider is a staff scientist in the Cognitive Science Branch of the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications at the U.S. National Library of Medicine. His research interests include terminology, knowledge representation and ontology in the biomedical domain, both from a theoretical perspective and in their application to natural language understanding, reasoning, information visualization and interoperability.

Dr. Bodenreider is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. He received a M.D. degree from the University of Strasbourg, France in 1990 and a Ph.D. in Medical Informatics from the University of Nancy, France in 1993. Before joining the NLM in 1996, he was an assistant professor for Biostatistics and Medical Informatics at the University of Nancy, France, Medical School.

Rex Chisholm, PhD

Director, Center for Genetic Medicine
Department of Cell and Molecular Biology and Surgery
Northwestern University Medical School

Dr. Rex Chisolm is the director of the Center for Genetic Medicine, a partnership between Northwestern University, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Children’s Memorial Hospital and Evanston Northwestern Healthcare that facilitates the development of new genetic knowledge and its application to medicine. Dr. Chisholm is also the Adam & Richard T. Lind Professor of Medical Genetics, and his research program uses genetic and molecular genetic approaches to investigate the fundamental process of cell motility. Chisholm's research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, and the Department of Defense.

Dr. Chisholm earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan, and continued his graduate studies there as well, earning a Ph.D. in 1980. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he developed methods for analyzing the patterns of gene expression during development.

Charles P. Friedman, PhD

Chief Scientific Officer
Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology

Charles P. Friedman, PhD. is currently the Chief Scientific Officer for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. As ONC’s chief scientist, he leads a group responsible for tracking and promoting innovation in health IT, for research programs to improve technology, for applications of health IT that support basic and clinical research, for evaluation of all of ONC’s programs, for programs to develop the health IT workforce, and for activities supporting global eHealth. Dr. Friedman served as Deputy National Coordinator for two years prior to assuming his new position. He was lead author of the national Health IT Strategic Plan released in June of 2008.

Prior to joining ONC, Dr. Friedman was Associate Director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health. In this capacity, he founded the Center for Research Informatics and Information Technology, and functioned as the Institute's Chief Information Officer. Dr. Friedman first joined NIH in 2003, as a Senior Scholar at the National Library of Medicine.

From 1996 to 2003, Dr. Friedman was Professor and Associate Vice Chancellor for Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh where he established a health sciences-wide Center for Biomedical Informatics, a well-funded program of informatics research, and masters and doctoral degree programs in biomedical informatics. He also served as Chief Information Officer for the University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences.

Dr. Friedman obtained bachelors and masters degrees in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and also received a PhD in education from the University of North Carolina (UNC). He wrote his first computer program in 1966. He spent over 19 years on the medical school faculty at UNC and served as Assistant Dean for Medical Education and Informatics. In 1985, he established the Laboratory for Computing and Cognition at UNC and, in 1992, started UNC's medical informatics training program.

Dr. Friedman has written extensively for scientific journals, and authored a well-known textbook. He is a past president of the American College of Medical Informatics, and was the 2005 chair of the Annual Symposium of the American Medical Informatics Association. He currently serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

Stanley M. Huff, MD

Professor (Clinical) - Medical Informatics
University of Utah - College of Medicine
Chief Medical Informatics Officer
Intermountain Healthcare

Dr. Stanley Huff is the Chief Medical Informatics Officer at Intermountain Healthcare, and a Professor (Clinical) in Medical Informatics at the University of Utah School of Medicine. Intermountain Healthcare is a charitable not-for-profit health care organization in the intermountain west that includes 22 hospitals, numerous primary care and specialty clinics, and a health plans (health insurance) division. Dr. Huff is responsible for the architecture and functions of all clinical information systems. His academic interests center on medical vocabularies, clinical information models, and medical database architectures, fields upon which his career has centered for over 20 years. He teaches a course in medical vocabulary and data exchange standards at the University of Utah. Dr. Huff was one of the participants in the early Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) contracts. He is currently working on the design and implementation of a next generation Electronic Medical Record system, focusing on the issues of linking standard terminologies and ontologies to detailed clinical models.

Dr. Huff received his B.S. degree in Chemistry from Brigham Young University and a M.D. degree from the University of Utah. He completed a year of Internal Medicine residency training at the University of New Mexico prior to completing a residency in Clinical Pathology at the University of Utah. Immediately after completing his residency training, Dr. Huff worked for two years with AT&T Bell Laboratories in Columbus Ohio. Since that time he has held various positions at Intermountain Healthcare and the University of Utah.

Dr. Huff is a member of the Editorial Board for the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), the Board of Directors of HL7, the Lister Hill Center Board of Scientific Counselors, a past member of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics, and a past Chair of the Board of Directors of HL7. He was also a founding member of the LOINC (Logical Observation Identifier Names and Codes) committee and is the current co-chair of the Clinical LOINC committee. Huff is a fellow of the American Board of Pathologists (ABP) and of the College of American Pathologists (CAP). He is also a member of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), and the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI).

Eric Miller

Co-founder and President of Zepheira

Eric Miller is co-founder and president of Zepheira, which provides solutions to effectively integrate, navigate and manage information across boundaries of person, group and enterprise. Dr. Miller serves as an adviser to businesses and other organizations, and as speaker at conferences worldwide providing insights on the evolution of the Web.

Until 2007, Eric led the Semantic Web Initiative for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at MIT. During his work at the W3C, Eric’s responsibilities included the architectural and technical leadership in the design and evolution of the Semantic Web. Eric served as a Research Scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory where he was a Principal Investigator on the MIT SIMILE project. Previously, Eric was a Senior Research Scientist at OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. in Dublin, Ohio and the co-founder and Associate Director of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, an open forum engaged in the development of interoperable online metadata standards that support a broad range of purposes and business models.

Alan L Rector, MD, PhD

Professor of Medical Informatics
School of Computer Science
The University of Manchester, England

Dr. Alan Rector is Professor of Medical Informatics in the Department of Computer Science at University of Manchester. He was presented with the first award for time achievement in Health Informatics by the British Computer Society in 2003. Over the past twenty-five years he has led a series of projects on clinical decision support, medical records, and medical terminology, including the ground breaking PEN&PAD project on intelligent medical records sponsored jointly by the UK Medical Research Council and Department of Health. During the 1990s, Rector's work focused on medical terminology and ontologies. He led the EU sponsored GALEN program and the UK Drug Ontology project, sponsored by the Department of Health, in conjunction with the Prodigy Programme for decision support in prescribing in general practice. He led the MRC sponsored Cooperative Clinical E-Science Framework (CLEF/CLEF-Services) consortium. Rector now leads industrial collaborations with Siemens Health Services (US) and Informatics CIS of Glasgow.

Rector's work on clinical terminology and ontologies provided a key stimulus for the technologies which underpin the use of ontologies for the Semantic Web. He now leads the CO-ODE consortium sponsored under the UK E-Science infrastructure initiative developing ontology tools which bring together frames, and has co-developed Proege-OWL, Protege4, and the OWL-API. He has been a visiting senior scientist at Stanford University and a consultant to the NHS Information Authority, Hewlett Packard, the Mayo Clinic, and a variety of smaller companies. Rector has been a member of the JISC Committee for the Support of Research, the National Cancer Research Institute Board for Bioinformatics, the Joint NHS/Higher Education Forum on Informatics, and the Board of the Academic Forum of the UK Institute for Health Informatics. He has also been active in HL7, the main standards body for health informatics, and on the board of HL7-UK.

Dr. Rector received his B.A. in Philosophy and Mathematics from Pomona College, completed his medical training at the Universities of Chicago and Minnesota, where he obtained his M.D., and earned his Ph.D. in Medical Informatics from the University of Manchester.

Bedirhan Üstün, MD

Coordinator
Classifications and Terminology
Evidence and Information for Policy
World Health Organization

Dr. Bedirhan Üstün has worked in WHO since 1990, first in Mental Health, then in Evidence Cluster as an international health officer, where he formed multiple international networks on Classification and Assessment of Health and Disability. He also worked in Mental Health Epidemiology, and Primary Care applications of classification and training programs. Currently Dr. Üstün is responsible for the WHO’s Family of International Classifications (ICD, ICF and other health classifications), and the development of standardized health terminologies. Dr. Üstün is the author and co-author of more than 150 articles, several books on psychiatry, primary care, classifications and health assessment.

Peter Lyster, PhD, Ex Officio

Program Director
Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
National Institute of General Medical Sciences
National Institutes of Health

Dr. Peter Lyster joined the NIH National Institute of General Medical Science (NIGMS) in 2004 as program director in the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. Dr. Lyster's expertise is in bioinformatics and computational biology, including image reconstruction and analysis, data mining, modeling, and data integration. He was formerly a program director at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. He was also one of the first scientific review administrators at the NIH Center for Scientific Review to focus on biomedical informatics and computational biology. At NIGMS, he manages grants in biological modeling and bioinformatics and plays a leading part in implementing NIGMS' participation in the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Roadmap.

Prior to joining NIH, Dr. Lyster worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where he laid the groundwork for some of the scientific applications of the Federal High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) initiative. He then became principal investigator in the HPCC program at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center at the University of Maryland. As such, he led the effort to use massive computing power to improve data collection for weather and climate models. Dr. Lyster conducted postdoctoral research in applied physics at the Institute for Fusion Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. in applied physics and M.Sc. in numerical analysis from Cornell University and received his undergraduate degrees with honors in electrical engineering and theoretical physics from the University of Adelaide, Australia.