Personal Statement


During the early-1970s, for my doctoral dissertation, I was principal developer of the medical expert system known as MYCIN. After a pause for internal medicine house-staff training at Harvard and Stanford between 1976 and 1979, I joined the Stanford internal medicine faculty where I have directed a research program in medical informatics. My interests include the broad range of issues related to integrated decision-support systems and their effective implementation. In the early 1980s, I worked to create the Stanford degree program in medical informatics. I continue to divide my time between clinical medicine and medical informatics research/administration. Since October 1995, I have been Associate Dean for Information Resources and Technology at Stanford University School of Medicine.

My publications are summarized on the SMI site (see link below). Other details are available in my Curriculum Vitae. 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. Buchanan; Addison-Wesley, 1984), and Medical Informatics: Computer Applications in Health Care and Biomedicine (with L.E. Perreault, G. Wiederhold, and L.M. Fagan; Addison-Wesley, 1990; second edition, Springer Verlag, 2000).