Centers fro Disease Control and Prevention
Office of Workforce and Career Development
1600 Clifton Rd NE
MS E-92
Atlanta,
GA
USA
30333
Email:
cke1@cdc.gov
Biographical Sketch:
Dr. Herman Tolentino is the Acting Director of the CDC Public Health Informatics Fellowship Program. He completed his B.S. in Biology (1980), his Doctor of Medicine degree (1985) and subsequently his anesthesiology residency training (1990) at the University of the Philippines in Manila. He attended his medical informatics fellowship at the Division of Biomedical and Health Informatics at the University of Washington in 1997 and completed his two-year Public Health Informatics Fellowship at the CDC in June 2006. Before coming to CDC, was involved with work to integrate notifiable disease surveillance systems in six Mekong Basin countries together with the WHO Western Pacific Regional Office, helped in the promotion of health informatics in the Asia Pacific region through his involvement with the Asia Pacific Association for Medical Informatics (APAMI). He was also Associate Professor in medical informatics and anesthesiology at the University of the Philippines where he helped design and implement the first graduate, two-track (bioinformatics and medical informatics) program in health informatics in the Philippines. He was first director of the Philippine National Telehealth Center where he initiated a government-funded program to develop a National Health Information Infrastructure for the Philippines and BuddyWorks, a national telemedicine program for physicians working in underserved areas. He also spent two years working on innovative web development projects in the I.T. industry. His interests include open source software development, integration of information systems, natural language processing, controlled vocabularies, semantic web, emerging infectious diseases and capacity building in health informatics. Among his notable work includes the development of an award-winning, innovative community-based health information system (http://www.chits.info) that integrates public health vertical programs at the community level, and EpiSPIDER (http://www.epispider.net) that tracks, visualizes and distributes emerging infectious disease and disaster information. He is currently Affiliate Clinical Associate Professor, School of Public Health, University of Illinois in Chicago. He is an active member of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and the International Society for Disease Surveillance (ISDS).