American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)
4915 St. Elmo Avenue
Suite 401
Bethesda,
MD
USA
20814
Email:
shortliffe@amia.org
Biographical Sketch:
(Note: Written to be accurate with regard to current activities as of late August 2009)
Edward H. Shortliffe was recruited to Arizona in March 2007 to serve as the founding dean of the Phoenix campus of the University of Arizona's College of Medicine, where he has also been appointed Professor of Basic Medical Sciences, Professor of Medicine, and (at Arizona State University) Professor of Biomedical Informatics. In May 2008 he stepped down from his dean's role to return to the faculty and, in January 2009, transferred his primary appointment from the University of Arizona (UofA) to Arizona State University (ASU). In September 2008 it was announced that he would be the next President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), headquartered in Bethesda, MD, beginning in July 2009. Between January and June 2009, he served as a consultant to AMIA as he transitioned into his new leadership role. His academic homes remained at ASU and the UofA after he began his role at AMIA in July 2009.
From January 2000 to March 2007 he was the Rolf A. Scholdager Professor and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City. Previously he was Professor of Medicine and of Computer Science at Stanford University (1979-2000).
After receiving an A.B. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard College in 1970, he moved to Stanford University where he was awarded a Ph.D. in Medical Information Sciences in 1975 and an M.D. in 1976. During the early-1970s, he was principal developer of the medical expert system known as MYCIN. After a pause for internal medicine house-staff training at Massachusetts General Hospital and Stanford Hospital between 1976 and 1979, he joined the Stanford internal medicine faculty where he served as Chief of General Internal Medicine, Associate Chair of Medicine for Primary Care, and was director of an active research program in clinical information systems and decision support. He spearheaded the formation of a Stanford graduate degree program in biomedical informatics and divided his time between clinical medicine and biomedical informatics research. In January 2000 he assumed his new post at Columbia University, where he was also Deputy Vice President (Columbia University Medical Center) and Senior Associate Dean (College of Physicians and Surgeons) for Strategic Information Resources, Professor of Medicine, Professor of Computer Science, and Director of Medical Informatics Services for the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. He continues to be closely involved with medical education and biomedical informatics graduate training. His research interests include the broad range of issues related to integrated decision-support systems, their effective implementation, and the role of the Internet in health care.
Dr. Shortliffe is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians, and the American Clinical and Climatological Association. He has also been elected to fellowship in the American College of Medical Informatics and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. He is a Master of the American College of Physicians (ACP) and was a member of that organization's Board of Regents from 1996-2002. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics, and serves on the editorial boards for several other biomedical informatics publications. He recently served on the oversight committee for the Division of Engineering and Physical Sciences (National Academy of Sciences), the Biomedical Informatics Expert Panel (National Center for Research Resources at the National Institutes of Health), the National Committee for Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS), and on the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC). Earlier he served on the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (National Research Council), the Biomedical Library Review Committee (National Library of Medicine), and was recipient of a research career development award from the latter agency. In addition, he received the Grace Murray Hopper Award of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1976 and has been a Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation Faculty Scholar in General Internal Medicine. Dr. Shortliffe has authored over 300 articles and books in the fields of medical computing and artificial intelligence. Volumes include Computer-Based Medical Consultations: MYCIN (Elsevier/North Holland, 1976), Readings in Medical Artificial Intelligence: the First Decade (with W.J. Clancey; Addison-Wesley, 1984), Rule-Based Expert Systems: The MYCIN Experiments of the Stanford Heuristic Programming Project (with B.G. Buchaan; Addison-Wesley, 1984), Medical Informatics: Computer Applications in Health Care and Biomedicine (with L.E. Perreault, G. Wiederhold, and L.M. Fagan; Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1990; 2nd edition, New York: Springer-Verlag, 2000), and the third edition of the latter textbook (Biomedical Informatics: Computer Applications in Health Care and Biomedicine, with J.J. Cimino, New York: Springer, 2006.