A New Pathway For My Career in Biomedical and Health Informatics

This year, 2022, marks a quarter-century of my leadership of academic informatics at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU). I have served for 19 years as the one and only Chair of the Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology (DMICE) in the OHSU School of Medicine. I served six years before that as Head of its predecessor free-standing Division of Medical Informatics & Outcomes Research, which was established in 1997.

I now plan to step down as Chair of DMICE while continuing at OHSU as a Professor in DMICE, focusing my activities on research, education, writing, and mentoring. I will support the new Chair and prioritize the continued success of the department.

I am pleased to hand off the department at a time when it is doing well academically and financially. The faculty are productive and well-funded in their research, and our educational programs continue to attract strong enrollment and prepare students for diverse careers in our field.

My own research and educational activities are also productive and well-funded. I plan to continue my research in applying information retrieval (IR, also known as search) methods to tasks such as patient cohort discovery though data from the electronic health record (EHR) for which I am funded with an R01 grant from the National Library of Medicine. I also intend to continue working in the evaluation of machine learning for clinical applications, mainly focused on diagnosis of rare diseases through EHR data.

I will also continue teaching both in the OHSU Biomedical Informatics Graduate Program as well as in external collaborations, such as with the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) in the 10x10 ("ten by ten") program and the Clinical Informatics Board Review Course (CIBRC). I will also continue existing and new National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded educational activities, including our recently renewed NLM T15 Training Grant, a new NLM R25 establishing a new college summer internship for students historically underrepresented in our field, the Data Science Initiative for Africa in collaboration with the University of Cape Town, and the new Bridge2AI Program.