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Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA logoLink to Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA
. 2019 Aug 21;26(10):1150–1155. doi: 10.1093/jamia/ocz138

The 2018 fellow cohort of the American College of Medical Informatics

Christopher G Chute 1, Suzanne Bakken 2, William M Tierney 3, Gretchen Jackson Purcell 4, James J Cimino 5
PMCID: PMC7647249

Founded in 1984, the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) is a college of elected Fellows from the United States and abroad who have made significant and sustained contributions to the field of biomedical informatics. On November 4, 2018, the 2018 Cohort of Fellows was introduced to the College and attendees at the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Annual Symposium as well as to the public through Tweets. This article includes the introduction for each Fellow in the 2018 Cohort, which was read by Christopher G. Chute (ACMI President), Suzanne Bakken (ACMI Past President), or William M. Tierney (ACMI President-Elect); a somewhat tongue-in-cheek Tweet created by Gretchen Purcell Jackson or James J. Cimino; and a link to their Journal of theAmerican Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) and JAMIA Open publications. This is followed by the traditional closing remarks of welcome into ACMI.

Gregory L. Alexander , PhD, RN, FAAN, FACMI

Potter-Brinton Endowed Professor, Sinclair School of Nursing and Department of Health Management and Informatics, University of Missouri Inline graphic

An internationally recognized nursing informatician and clinical expert with 25+ years of research and clinical practice leadership, Dr Alexander leads an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality–funded R01 and 2 Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services national demonstration projects. He has served on many influential national level committees and boards and is one of the very few nurse informaticians recognized globally for his work in long-term care informatics.

Long-term care informatician Gregory Alexander PhD RN FAAN @GregAlexanderg Nursing&HealthMgmt& Informatics U of MO @MizzouNursing @mumedicine now to be long-term Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics: congrats to #ACMI18 #AMIA2018

JAMIA articles

Sarah A. Collins , PhD, RN, FACMI

Assistant Professor, Biomedical Informatics and Nursing, Columbia UniversityInline graphic

Dr Collins is an informatician, scientist, and critical care nurse active in informatics research with a focus on data modeling, clinical, patient safety, and data science. The primary outcome of her work, including her current R01, is innovative tools to improve patient safety and prevent patient harm and avoidable deaths in real time.

ICU float nurse Sarah Collins PhD RN @Sarah_A_Collins lands as informatician at @CU_Nursing @ColumbiaDBMI and becomes Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics #ACMI18 #AMIA2018

JAMIA articles

JAMIA Open articles

Lesley H. Curtis, PhD

Professor and Chair, Population Health Sciences, Duke University School of Medicine

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Dr Curtis is an international expert in the use of electronic health data for comparative

effectiveness, safety, and patient-centered outcomes research. She has leveraged that expertise to build national data resources including the Food and Drug Administration’s Sentinel Network, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Collaboratory’s Distributed Research Network, and PCORnet’s distributed research network.

Lesley Curtis, PhD, 1st chair of Dept of Pop Health Sci @DukeMedSchool, leader of @PCORnetwork, co-PI #NIH @Collaboratory1, has worked with health systems & patient networks to develop a HARMONIZED data infrastructure for research. And she sings! Welcome to #ACMI2018 #AMIA2018

JAMIA articles

Brian E. Dixon, MPD, PhD

Associate Professor and Research Scientist,

Department of Epidemiology and Center for Biomedical Informatics, Indiana University Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health and Regenstrief Institute, Inc

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Dr Dixon is a nationally recognized leader in public and population health informatics through research, peer-reviewed publications, mentoring, and books. For over a decade, his research has leveraged leading-edge health information exchange to improve public health processes while improving decision making and outcomes for populations in Indiana and beyond.

Brian Dixon, MPA, PhD, @dpugrad01, #FHIMSS, leader in #PublicHealth, #PopHealth, #Informatics, #HIE, 3 #MichelinStar restaurants, @FSPH_IUPUI @IUMedSchool @Regenstrief #GoodGrief, My, my, welcome new #FACMI! #ACMI2018 #AMIA2018

JAMIA articles

Warren A. Kibbe, PhD

Professor and Chief for Translational Biomedical Informatics, Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics and Chief Data Officer, Duke Cancer Institute

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Dr Kibbe formerly served as director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology, where he oversaw 60 federal employees and more than 600 contractors. As acting NCI Deputy Director, he was involved in the myriad of activities that NCI oversees as a research organization, as a convening body for cancer research, and as a major funder of cancer research in the United States.

Warren Kibbe, PhD, @wakibbe, chief of Translational Biomedical Informatics @DukeMedSchool, former @theNCI #CBIIT director, leader in #HIT and #informatics for cancer research, bikes to work, up hill, both ways, every day, rain or shine. Now he's #FACMI #ACMI2018 #AMIA2018

JAMIA articles

Subha Madhavan, PhD

Director, Innovation Center for Biomedical Informatics, Department of Oncology and Department of Biostatistics, Bioinformatics and Biomathematics, Georgetown University

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Dr Madhavan’s major accomplishments are in multiomic data modeling and standardization, and their translational applications in clinical research and care. Her research has been continuously funded over the last 10 years by multiple data standardization and open tools, methods, and informatics technology development programs including Proteomics data commons, ClinGen, and BD2K.

Congrats Subha Madhavan PhD @subhamadhavan Ctr Biomed Informatics @ICBI_Georgetown 2016 AMIA Translational Bioinformatics Summit Chair creator TCGA portal REMBRANDT painted picture of personalized medicine now Fellow of American College of Medical Informatics #ACMI2018 #AMIA2018

JAMIA articles

John Mantas, PhD

Professor and Director of the Laboratory of Health Informatics, School of Nursing, University of Athens (Greece)

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Dr Mantas has contributed to the development of graduate education in nursing and health informatics globally, including developing recommendations and standards for informatics graduate programs. Over the years, Dr Mantas has played significant roles such as President of the European Federation for Medical Informatics and Vice-President of International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) and Chair of the Accreditation and Certification Committee of the European Federation for Medical Informatics, and contributed to synergies between AMIA and other informatics organizations worldwide.

Congrats John Mantas PhD Nursing U of Athens @uoaofficial prez of Greek #AMIA2018, fellow of Greek ACMI, member of International Fuzzy Sets Assoc – your COMETT and NIGHTENGALE projects let you fly in to fellowship at the American College of Medical Informatics #ACMI2018 #AMIA2018

Michael E. Matheny, MD

Associate Professor, Biomedical Informatics, Vanderbilt University Medical Center

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Dr Matheny has consistently authored peer-reviewed publications in informatics journals, starting in 2005 every year to 2018. He has made sustained contributions to informatics in the areas of software for distributed analytics and automated medical device surveillance, and his surveillance tools are now in use in the medical device industry, by the Food and Drug Administration, and in academia.

Mild-mannered, #OMOP master, Michael Matheny, MD, MS, MPH, Director of @VUMCHealth @vumcDBMI Center for Pop Health Informatics, @VeteransHealth internist, for contributions to #distributed #analytics, #device #surveillance, and #alliteration, welcome to #ACMI #ACMI2018 #AMIA2018

JAMIA articles

Frank Naeymi-Rad, PhD, MBA

CEO and Chairman of the Board, Intelligent Medical Objects, Inc

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In addition to founding Intelligent Medical Objects and guiding it to become the premier terminology vendor for electronic health records (EHRs) now used by about 85% of all physicians and nurses, Dr Naeymi-Rad has over 50 scientific publication and holds 11 patents related to EHRs and health enterprise informatics.

Congrats to Frank Naeymi-Rad, PhD, MBA @frankrad founder&CEO Intelligent Medical Objects @IMOsolutions helping NASA put medical dictionary on Mars now inducted as Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics demonstrating #ACMI18 is an intelligent object #AMIA2018

JAMIA articles

Jyotishman Pathak, PhD

Frances & John L. Loeb Professor of Medical Informatics, Healthcare Policy & Research, Weill Cornell Medicine

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Dr Pathak has emerged as the leader in the rapidly evolving space of computational phenotyping from electronic medical records (EMRs). He has leveraged a broad spectrum of clinical data normalization techniques to generate reproducible phenotypes from heterogeneous sources. He has demonstrated academic and applied leadership and productivity in this field.

Congrats to Jyotishman Pathak PhD @jyotipathak Med Informatics Healthcare Policy & Research @WCMhpr Cornell - eMERGED as a SHARP developer of phenotyping algorithms, worked with LexValueSets LexGrid LexBIG so #ACMI18 said “Lex give him the phenotype of Fellow” #AMIA2018

JAMIA articles

JAMIA Open articles

Niels Peek, PhD

Professor of Health Informatics, Division of Informatics, Imaging and Data Science, University of Manchester (United Kingdom)

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Professor Niels Peek is an internationally accomplished researcher, educator, and informatics leader. He has made major contributions to the U.S. and international biomedical informatics communities through his work for the IMIA and the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME) Society.

Niels Peek, MSc, PhD, @NielsPeek, Director, Greater Manchester Connected Health City @OfficialUoM and leader for informatics & data science at #NIHR @ManchesterBRC, international leader @IMIAtweets and #AI in Medicine (AIME) Society, we welcome you as #FACMI #ACMI2018 #AMIA2018

JAMIA articles

Yuri Quintana, PhD

Director, Global Health Informatics & Assistant Professor of Medicine, Division of Clinical Informatics, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School

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Dr Quintana has been a leader in the field of medical informatics for over 2 decades. He led the development of Cure4Kids, the leading online network for pediatric cancer clinical education and collaboration, and POND4Kids (Pediatric Oncology Networked Database) for collaborative international clinical trials used by over 200 clinical centers in low- and middle-income countries.

@YuriQuintana, PhD, @BIDMChealth @dcihmfp @HarvardMed, leads global education & informatics collaborations in #PedsOnc Cure4Kids.org POND4Kids.org @onco_pedia Serious Games 4 Health @SGforHealth. He is SERIOUSLY a big fish in #FACMI pond, #ACMI2018 #AMIA2018

Donald W. Rucker, MD

National Coordinator, Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, Dept. of Health and Human Services

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Dr Rucker is a national pioneer in commercial EMR design, as well as a national leader in commercial computerized physician order entry (CPOE) design. He pioneered the first Microsoft Windows EMR, which included the first use of Dragon speech technology (1988). At Siemens, he led the design of the graphical user interface of the flagship mainframe CPOE system and personally led the national work to get this system successfully installed in approximately 30 major institutions with roughly 30 000 physician users.

Donald Rucker, MD @DonRucker is National Coordinator for @ONC_HealthIT, former CMO @SiemensHealth, a national leader in #EHR #CPOE, and advocate for #HealthIT #BeyondInteroperability #BurdenReduction, and he’s so right! We are proud to welcome him as #FACMI #ACMI2018 #AMIA2018

JAMIA articles

Catherine Staes, PhD

Associate Professor, Biomedical Informatics, University of Utah

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For 18 years, Dr Staes has sought to improve population health through applied informatics research, with a focus on supporting clinical decision making and improving communication between public health and clinical information systems. She co-led development of the Reportable Condition Knowledge Management System and has also developed and deployed a system for immunosuppression monitoring following liver transplantation.

Catherine Staes, BSN, MPH, PhD from University of Utah @uudbmi is a leader in #PublicHealth, #PopHealth, #AppliedInformatics, and #telemark skiing, former #PICU & Onc nurse, Epidemic Intelligence Service officer @CDCgov, has skied across Sweden and into #FACMI #ACMI2018 #AMIA2018

JAMIA Articles

Cui Tao, PhD

Professor, School of Biomedical Informatics, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston

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Dr Tao is an internationally recognized scientist in medical iInformatics, specializing in the fields of ontologies and terminologies. She has published more than 100 articles and is currently the principal investigator for 3 NIH-funded projects. She is a recipient of the prestigious PECASE award named by President Obama.

Congrats to Cui Tao PhD Biomedical Informatics U of Texas Houston @UTHealth_SBMI after all that work on ontologies and editing all those special issues, we issue the special announcement that you are now labeled with the *term* “Fellow” in the *class* “2018” of #ACMI18 #AMIA2018

JAMIA articles

Özlem Uzuner, PhD

Associate Professor, Department Information Sciences and Technology, George Mason University

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Dr Uzuner has been a leader of the clinical natural language processing community since organizing the first ever shared-task in this domain in 2006 and has de-identified, annotated, and released clinical corpora for 12 different cutting-edge natural language processing tasks. Her methods and data are heavily relied on in the community.

Congrats to Özlem Uzuner PhD @ozlem_uzuner_gm InformationSciences&Tech @GeorgeMasonU – since you have worked tirelessly on shared tasks, such as text de-identification, we are happy to share the news that you have been identified as a new Fellow of #ACMI18 #AMIA2018

JAMIA articles

David K. Vawdrey, PhD

Associate Professor, Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University; Vice President and Director, Value Institute, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital

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Dr Vawdrey has shown a sustained and significant contribution to the field of informatics in applying informatics principles to healthcare operations, advancing informatics science through research, and developing our health informatics research workforce through mentoring and teaching. As Founding Director of the Value Institute, he leads a analytics team of 100+.

Congrats to David K. Vawdrey PhD @DavidVawdrey BiomedInformatics Columbia @ColumbiaDBMI Director of Value Institute - runs EHR systems but even housestaff love him, American College of Medical Informatics #ACMI18 now values you as a new Fellow #AMIA2018

JAMIA articles

Kai Zheng, PhD

Associate Professor of Informatics and Emergency Medicine; Director, Center for Biomedical Informatics, University of California, Irvine

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Dr Zheng is a nationally-recognized scholar who has made significant scientific contributions in software usability, workflow analysis, and user acceptance of health IT through support from multiple funding agencies (NIH, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, U.S. Department of Defense). He also played an instrumental role in establishing University of Michigan's Master of Health Informatics Program, and directed the program for a year before he joined UC Irvine.

Welcome Kai Zheng PhD of @UCIrvine @UCI_Informatics, Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences @UCIbrenICS, as new fellow of #ACMI for national leadership and #informatics #science contributions on #HIT #workflow, #usability, and #userexperience! #ACMI2018 #AMIA2018

JAMIA articles

The Induction Ceremony concluded with the traditional ACMI Welcome Incantation that was authored by Daniel Masys, MD, and has been used to welcome decades of Fellows:

It has been said that the sweetest reward of a life of professional achievement is recognition by one's peers. Each of the persons recognized this evening has, by their sustained achievements, won the respect and admiration of their peers. Each of you, through your creativity, academic rigor, and perseverance, has brought recognition and honor to the discipline of Medical Informatics. Tonight, and from this point forward in time, that recognition and that honor, in some small measure, is returned to each of you. May this celebration of your achievements inspire you to yet greater contributions to Medical Informatics, for the betterment of all humanity.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank the members of the ACMI Election and Nominations Committee: Suzanne Bakken (Chair), Elmer Bernstam, George Demiris, Leslie Lenert, Eneida Mendonca, Rachel Richesson, Roy Simpson, Stuart Speedie, and Peter Tarczy-Hornoch.


Articles from Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA are provided here courtesy of Oxford University Press

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