Relevant News & Links

Amit Sheth

The Kno.e.sis Center, an Internet technology research organization at Wright State University is headed by Amit Sheth, who holds the position of LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar. Sheth has received more than $10 million in funding for his work from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Defense, the National Institutes of Health and private industry. Sheth came to Wright State in January from the University of Georgia, bringing most of his team with him. Some of the areas being explored by Sheth's team include:

  • Developing electronic record-keeping systems that will give doctors instant advice on how to avoid harmful drug interactions and find the best match between diagnosis and treatment.
  • Improving the automation of biology experiments and providing better analyses of their data to understand such things as the role of complex carbohydrates in cancer.

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Noshir Contractor

Dr. Noshir Contractor is currently the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Industrial Engineering & Management Science, Communication Studies, and Management & Organizations at Northwestern University. He is the Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Group. His research team is developing and testing theories and methods of network science to map, understand and enable more effective (disaster response networks, public health networks, transnational immigrant networks, and environmental engineering networks. His research program has been funded continuously for the past decade by major grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation with additional funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the Rockefeller Foundation.He is the lead developer of IKNOW (Inquiring Knowledge Networks On the Web), and its Cyberinfrastructure extension CI-KNOW, a network recommender system to enable communities using cyberinfrastructure, as well as Blanche, a software environment to simulate the dynamics of social networks.

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Philip Payne

Dr. Philip Payne is an assistant professor of Biomedical Informatics at The Ohio State University, Columbus. He also serves as the Translational Research Informatics Architect for The Ohio State University Medical Center. Dr. Payne earned his Ph.D. in Biomedical Informatics from Columbia University, where his research focused on the use of knowledge engineering methodologies to improve the design of clinical trial participant tracking tools. Prior to his doctoral studies, Dr. Payne served as both the director of informatics for the CLL Research Consortium (cll.ucsd.edu), and as the Lead Programmer and Systems Analyst for the UCSD Hamilton Glaucoma Center. The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) has recently shifted its focus to the domain of clinical research informatics. The organization is planning to develop a strategy that they hope will support clinical research informatics in the discovery and management of new knowledge relating to health and disease. Dr. Payne is a co-chair of CRIS (Clinical Research Informatics Steering), the task force assigned to the project. Members of the CRIS Task Force are composed mainly of members from the Clinical Research Work Group and others who are predominately associated with management of research databases in academic health centers across the nation.

Rebecca Kush

Rebecca Daniels Kush, Ph.D. is a Founder and the current President of the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC), a non-profit organization dedicated to the development of global data interchange standards to support the acquisition, exchange, submission and archive of clinical trial data. Prior to dedicating full-time as President of CDISC, Dr. Kush founded a consulting company, Catalysis, Inc. Focus areas for consulting are strategy, process analysis and redesign, particularly associated with "electronic clinical trials"; project management infrastructure and training; implementation of enabling technologies; and clinical trial metrics. Dr. Kush has over 25 years of experience in clinical research and activities related to drug development. She has spent nine years at Pharmaco, an international contract research organization, in a variety of positions, the latest of which was to coordinate a corporate process analysis and redesign effort. Other positions within this CRO included direction of a Standards and Resources Department, Director of Clinical Processes, and Associate Director of Project Management, QC and Medical Writing.

Through the formal relationship between CDISC and Health Level Seven (HL7), Dr. Kush is a member of HL7. She is also a member of DIA, SCDM, and ACRP. She has served on the Steering Committee of the Americas for DIA for three years and has chaired the program development for numerous workshops in the areas of EDC, eClinical Trials, and Data Standards.

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Joel Saltz

Dr. Joel Saltz holds the Davis Endowed Chair of Cancer at The Ohio State University and a Senior Fellow of the OSU Supercomputing Center.

Additionally, he is a Professor and Chair of the Department of the Biomedical Informatics. Dr. Joel Saltz has developed a rich set of middleware optimization and runtime compilation methods that target irregular, adaptive, and multi-resolution applications. He was the originator of the inspector-executor compilation framework and has extended this framework to handle a wide variety of computationally intensive applications as well as to the optimization of queries that target disk-based multi-resolution datasets. This work has encompassed a wide variety of architectural platforms, ranging from high-end multiprocessors to clusters to distributed grid environments. Dr. Saltz is also heavily involved in the development of ambitious biomedical applications for high-end computers, very large-scale storage systems, and grid environments. He has played a pioneering role in the developing of Pathology virtual slide technology and has made major contributions to informatics applications that support point-of-care testing. He is the PI and director of the NIH-funded Center for Grid-Enabled Medical Image Analysis, plays a leadership role in the development of the core NCI caBIG grid architecture, is a project leader in the NCI-funded Center on Integrative Medicine. Dr. Saltz has an extensive funding history with DARPA, NASA, and the DOD, in high-end computing and biomedical computing projects.

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Charles Jaffe

Dr. Jaffe is the CEO of Health Level 7. Previously, he was the Senior Global Strategist for the Digital Health Group at Intel Corporation, Vice President of Life Sciences at SAIC and the Director of Medical Informatics at AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals. He completed his medical training at Johns Hopkins and Duke Universities, and was a post-doctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health and at Georgetown University. Formerly, he was President of InforMed, an informatics consultancy for research informatics. Over his career, he has been the principal investigator for more than 200 clinical trials, and has served in various leadership roles in the American Medical Informatics Association. He has been a board member on leading organizations for information technology standards, and served as the chair of a national institutional review board. Currently he holds an appointment in the Department of Engineering at Penn State University. He has been the contributing editor for several journals and has published on a range of subjects, including clinical management, informatics deployment, and healthcare policy.

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Bill Hersh

William Hersh, M.D. is Professor and Chair of the Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology (DMICE) in the School of Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) in Portland, Oregon. He also has academic appointments in the Division of General Internal Medicine of the Department of Medicine and in the Department of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at OHSU. Dr. Hersh has been at OHSU since 1990, where he has developed research and educational programs in biomedical informatics. He is internationally recognized for his contributions to the field. He is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and a Fellow of the American College of Physicians (ACP). Dr. Hersh is also Chair of the Working Group on Education of the International Medical Informatics Association as well as Chair of the ACP's Medical Informatics Subcommittee. He previously served as Secretary of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). Dr. Hersh's research focuses on the development and evaluation of information retrieval systems for biomedical practitioners and researchers. The majority of his research funding comes from the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the National Science Foundation. He has published over 100 scientific papers and is author of the book, Information Retrieval: A Health and Biomedical Perspective (Second Edition, Springer-Verlag, 2003), which has an associated Web site, irbook.info. Dr. Hersh serves as Editor for the Americas of the journal Information Retrieval and as Deputy Editor of the Journal of Biomedical Knowledge and Discovery. He also serves on the editorial board of several other scientific journals.Dr. Hersh is also actively involved in clinical and translational research. He serves as Director of the Biomedical Informatics Program of the Oregon Clinical and Translational Research Institute (OCTRI), which is one of 12 centers initially funded by the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) initiative of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to promote translational research. Dr. Hersh is also Chair of the CTSA National Informatics Steering Committee, convened by the NIH.

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Judge Schonfeld

Judge Schonfeld CEO of CureHunter, Inc. has a distinguished 40-year career in computational linguistics research and the scientific instrumentation industry. He was a principal researcher 1971-1974 on Dr. John Olney’s UCLA Semantic Foundations Team that was funded by NLM and DARPA to produce the first unabridged machine-readable dictionaries of the English Language, the first computers capable of understanding human spoken language, and the first intelligent search engines grounded in morphological decomposition, etymology and ontology models: “cardiopathology = disease of the heart.” These approaches allowed machines to cluster related concepts as opposed to simply finding spelling-matched strings and established the conceptual analysis formulas, dictionaries and theoretical basis for many informatics and AI systems yet to be conceived--at a time when only a handful of books in the world could be read by computers. In 1975, he left academic research to direct technical communications for Beckman Instruments, Toshiba Medical Systems, Bausch & Lomb Applied Research Laboratories, Tektronix and Intel with a focus on converting analog to digital technology and scientific visualization for Alias-Wavefront. He has introduced over 500 major new scientific instruments to world technical markets and has concluded that cyberspace is best modeled as a “textual 4-D knowledge volume” that can be instrumented for rigorous and precise medical data mining via semantically intelligent computational linguistic models fused with MRI, Finite Element Models and others from the physical sciences and evolutionary biology. He founded CureHunter in 2003, with his sons Dr. Justin Schonfeld, Ph.D. Computational Biology and Alexander Schonfeld a former Presidential Scholar in Computer Science at Oregon State University, an expert in machine translation, and senior R&D Engineer for SONY’s Medical Information Systems Subsidiary: So-Net M3.

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