Health informatics is making headway in the news, and innovators such as the ones listed below in our top 10 most influential informatics professors, are highlighted in recent headlines. Their work, creations and publications in both the fields of health and in informatics influence how leaders view informatics and their use in today’s market. With their inroads into this field, you might consider application to the college that hires a specific professor — especially if you want to learn from the best.
The following list is ordered alphabetically by surname. These professors are denied full credits to their accomplishments for lack of space. Please follow the linked names to their faculty page to learn more about each individual’s achievements.
Dr. Dominik Aronsky, MD is Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics & Emergency Medicine at Vanderbilt University, is interested in interdisciplinary research with a focus on developing, implementing, integrating, and evaluating decision support systems for real time, clinical applications. He is on the board of the AMIA (American Medical Informatics Association) as well as serving as board member for the AMIA’s new GHIP (Global Health Informatics Partnership). His recent work in emergency department information systems was presented by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) as part of a informatics lecture series.
Dr. William Hersh, MD, Professor and Chair, Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology, Oregon Health & Science University, is a leader and innovator in biomedical informatics both in education and research. Among his many accomplishments, Dr. Hersh spearheaded OHSU’s efforts in distance learning for biomedical informatics, which are available up to the master’s degree level. He also conceptualized and implemented the first offering of the AMIA’s 10×10 program, which aims to educate 10,000 health care professionals and others in biomedical informatics. He also maintains a blog called the Informatics Professor.
Dr. John H. Holmes, Associate Professor of Medical Informatics in Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, conducts research in medical informatics and epidemiology. He is an active member for the AMIA, serving as Chairs of the Education Committee and of the GHIP. He has an international reputation for applying evolutionary computation to epidemiologic data mining, and his work reaches across gender and race in fields of clinical research and public health in areas such as African-American men and prostate cancer screening and firearms-related morbidity and mortality in indigent, urban and mentally ill populations.
Dr. Julie Jacko is a Professor of Public Health at the University of Minnesota, and a Faculty Fellow in the Academic Health Center’s Institute for Health Informatics. Her research activities focuses on human-computer interaction, universal access to electronic information technologies, and technological aspects of health care delivery. She is the author or co-author of over 120 research publications, and is internationally recognized for her contributions to applications and theory development related to human aspects of personal, mobile, and networked computing, and particularly her landmark contributions advancing technology access for people with visual impairments.
Dr. Daniel Janies, associate professor of Biomedical Informatics at the Ohio State University, along with Prosanta Chakrabarty, are taking a deeper look into the Gulf oil disaster. Through research and re-purposed technology, the two are investigating the extent of oil and chemical and the distribution of various fish species. Janies’ research objectives are to continue to develop computational and evolutionary sciences in a comparative genomics context to develop novel phylogenetic methods. To this end, Janies has created several applications to track the avian influenza virus (H5N1) — and, more recently, to monitor the H1N1 virus — on a real-time geographic information system. Dr. Janies recently was elected as Vice President of the Willi Hennig Society.
Dr. Gloria Mark is a professor at the Department of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, UC Irvine. Her research interest is in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) which is the study of collaboration technologies and people. Dr. Mark is widely published in the fields of computer supported cooperative work and human-computer interaction and her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Time magazine. Her recent study about multitasking has made headlines, as she found that people who frequently were interrupted often work faster, but produce less.
Dr. J. Marc Overhage, President and CEO of IHIE (Indiana Health information Exchange), also is the Director of Medical Informatics at the Regenstrief Institute and Regenstrief Professor of Medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine. Dr. Overhage’s research has focused on the use of informational interventions to modify provider behavior including computerized provider order entry, clinical decision support systems and other forms of feedback. Recently, Dr. Overhage began advising the federal government on policy-guiding health information technology and developing sustainable models for providing health information services. Dr. Overhage is a fellow of the AMIA and the American College of Physicians (ACP).
Dr. Beth Plale, a professor in the IU Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing, is an experimental computer scientist whose research interests are in data management, data-driven computing, and the long-term preservation of digital data. She is the founder and Director of the Center for Data and Search Informatics (DSI) in the School of Informatics, and leads the Data to Insight Center in the Pervasive Technologies Institute. Dr. Plale is on the leadership team of several major grant funded projects, and she co-founded the Women in Informatics and Computing group at IU. She is a recipient of the prestigious DOE Early Career Award and has authored or co-authored over 65 publications.
Dr. Joseph Tan is the Wayne C. Fox Chair in eBusiness Innovation and Professor of Health Informatics, DeGroote Business School, McMaster University, Canada and Professor of Information Systems Management at Wayne State University. Tan’s research interests, which include eHealth and eBusiness, have enjoyed significant support from local, national, and international funding agencies and other sources, has been widely cited and applied across a number of major disciplines. He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief at International Journal of Health Information Systems and Informatics.
Dr. Gregory D. Weber, associate professor of informatics at Indiana University East, has developed an open source software program to help informatics students to effectively learn recursion by drawing diagrams. Sifflet is a visual, functional programming language that provides a graphical high-level view of how a complex computation works and allows users to ‘zoom in’ to see more details as needed. Sifflet is not the first open source software program Weber has written. He has also developed OrganDesigner, a graphical editor and SoundFont converter for MIDI-based virtual organs.
