Biographical Sketch

Summary

Edward H. Shortliffe is Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Senior Advisor to the Executive Vice Provost and Dean for the College of Health Solutions at Arizona State University. Based for much of the year in New York City, he is a Scholar in Residence at the New York Academy of Medicine and holds academic positions as Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons and as Adjunct Professor of Public Health (Quality and Medical Informatics) at Weill Cornell Medical College.

Previously he served from July 2009 through March 2012 as President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), headquartered in Bethesda, MD. He and his wife, Vimla L. Patel, currently maintain their principal residence in New York City. Until October 2011, they were based in Houston where they both held positions as professors in the School of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Texas Health Science Center. A leader in biomedical informatics for four decades, Dr. Shortliffe was recruited from New York to Arizona in March 2007 to serve as the founding dean of the Phoenix campus of the University of Arizona's College of Medicine. There he was also 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 to Arizona State University. He and Dr. Patel moved from Arizona to Texas in November 2009 and back to New York in October 2011.

From January 2000 to March 2007 Dr. Shortliffe 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 (where he currently serves on the IOM executive council), 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. Buchanan; 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); Biomedical Informatics: Computer Applications in Health Care and Biomedicine (with James J. Cimino); New York: Springer, 2006; and the fourth edition of the latter textbook (2014).


Education

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Other Relevant Past Experience