Scientific Advisory Board
Olivier Bodenreider, MD, PhD
Jill P. Mesirov, PhD
Eric Miller
Alan L Rector, MD, PhD
Lincoln Stein, MD, PhD
Bedirhan Üstün
Olivier Bodenreider, MD, PhD
Staff ScientistNational Library of Medicine
Bethesda, MD
Olivier Bodenreider is a Staff Scientist in the Cognitive Science Branch of the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications at the U.S. National Library of Medicine. His research interests include terminology, knowledge representation and ontology in the biomedical domain, both from a theoretical perspective and in their application to natural language understanding, reasoning, information visualization and interoperability.
Dr. Bodenreider is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. He received a M.D. degree from the University of Strasbourg, France in 1990 and a Ph.D. in Medical Informatics from the University of Nancy, France in 1993. Before joining NLM in 1996, he was an assistant professor for Biostatistics and Medical Informatics at the University of Nancy, France, Medical School.
Jill P. Mesirov, PhD
Associate Director and Chief Informatics Officer Director, Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Broad Institute of MIT and HarvardDr. Mesirov is chief informatics officer of the Broad Institute where she directs the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Organization. She is also adjunct professor of bioinformatics at Boston University.
Dr. Mesirov is a computational scientist who has spent many years working in the area of high-performance computing on problems that arise in science, engineering and business applications. Her current research interest is computational biology with a focus on algorithms and analytic methodologies for pattern recognition and discovery with applications to cancer genomics, genome analysis and interpretation, and comparative genomics. In addition, Mesirov is committed to the development of practical, accessible software tools to bring these methods to the general biomedical research community.
In 1997, Dr. Mesirov came to the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research, now part of the Broad Institute, from IBM, where she was manager of computational biology and bioinformatics in the Healthcare/Pharmaceutical Solutions Organization. Before joining IBM in 1995, she was director of research at Thinking Machines Corporation for 10 years. She has also held positions in the mathematics department at the University of California at Berkeley, the Institute for Defense Analyses' Center for Communications Research in Princeton, and as associate executive director of the American Mathematical Society.
Dr. Mesirov is a trustee of the Institute for Defense Analyses, a member of review committees for the Department of Energy's Argonne, Livermore, and Los Alamos National Laboratories, the Board of Directors of the International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB), and the National Research Council’s Board of Mathematical Sciences and its Applications. She has also served as a member of the Biology and Environmental Research Advisory Committee of the Department of Energy, president of the Association for Women in Mathematics, trustee of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, trustee of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California, and chair of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and serves on numerous academic and corporate scientific advisory and journal editorial boards.
Dr. Mesirov received her A.B. from the University of Pennsylvania in mathematics and Ph.D. in mathematics from Brandeis University.
Eric Miller
President, Zepheira
(Former) Semantic Web Activity Lead, W3C World Wide Web Consortium
Research Scientist, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Eric Miller is the President and Founder of The Zepheire Group, Inc. which provides solutions to effectively integrate, navigate and manage information across boundaries of person, group and enterprise. These solutions enable organizations to integrate data from different departments and and systems allowing for team collaboration, improved customer care, and support of executive goals. Dr. Miller is highly sought-after as an advisor to businesses and other organization, and as speaker at conferences worldwide providing insights on the evolution of the Web.
Most recently, Eric led the Semantic Web Initiative for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at MIT. During his work at the W3C, Eric's responsibilities included the architectural and technical leadership in the design and evolution of the Semantic Web. Responsibilities also included working with W3C members to develop global Web standards and conventions that support Semantic Web requirements and to establish liaison with other technical standards bodies and related industries to ensure compliance with existing Semantic Web standards and collect requirements for future W3C work in this area. Eric was instrumental in connecting organizations using Semantic Web technologies to allow them to collaborate on best practices in using these technologies.
Before joining the W3C, Eric was a Senior Research Scientist at OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. in Dublin, Ohio and the co-founder and Associate Director of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, an open forum engaged in the development of interoperable online metadata standards that support a broad range of purposes and business models.
Eric holds a Research Scientist position at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory where he is a Principal Investigator on the MIT SIMILE project focused on developing robust, open source tools based on Semantic Web technologies that improve access, management and reuse among digital resources.
Alan L Rector, MD, PhD
Professor of Medical InformaticsSchool of Computer Science
The University of Manchester
Manchester, England
Alan Rector is Professor of Medical Informatics in the Department of Computer Science at University of Manchester. He was presented with the first award for time achievement in Health Informatics by the British Computer Society in 2003. Over the past twenty-five years he has led a series of projects on clinical decision support, medical records, and medical terminology including the ground breaking PEN&PAD project on intelligent medical records sponsored jointly by the UK Medical Research Council and Department of Health. During the 1990s his work focused on medical terminology and ontologies, and he led the EU sponsored GALEN programme (www.opengalen.org) and the UK Drug Ontology project sponsored by the Department of Health in conjunction with the Prodigy Programme for decision support in prescribing in general practice. He now leads the MRC sponsored Cooperative Clinical E-Science Framework (CLEF/CLEF-Services) consortium of seven UK universities, NHS trusts, and Cancer Networks which aims to provide “joined up” information solutions for clinical care and clinical and bioscience research in cancer (www.clinical-escience.org).
His work on clinical terminology and ontologies provided a key stimulus for the technologies which underpin the use of ontologies for the Semantic Web, and he now leads the CO-ODE consortium sponsored under the UK E-Science infrastructure initiative developing ontology tools which bring together frames and the new web ontology language OWL by combining two well known systems, Protégé and OilEd. He has been a visiting senior scientist at Stanford University and consultant to the NHS Information Authority, Hewlett Packard, the Mayo Clinic, and a variety of smaller companies. He is a member of the JISC Committee for the Support of Research, the National Cancer Research Institute Board for Bioinformatics, the Joint NHS/Higher Education Forum on Informatics, and the Board of the Academic Forum of the UK Institute for Health Informatics. He is also active in HL7, the main standards body for health informatics, and on the board of HL7-UK. Professor Rector received his BA in Philosophy and Mathematics from Pomona College, his medical training at the universities of Chicago and Minnesota where he obtained his MD, and his PhD in Medical Informatics from the University of Manchester.
Lincoln Stein, MD, PhD
Professor of BioinformaticsCold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Cold Spring Harbor, NY
Lincoln Stein is an MD/PhD who works on biological data integration and visualization. After his training at Harvard Medical School, where he became a board-certified pathologist, he worked at the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research, where he developed the databases used for the mouse and human genome maps. At Cold Spring Harbor he works on a variety of genome-scale databases including WormBase, the database of the C. elegans genome, Gramene, a comparative genome mapping database for rice and other monocots, the International HapMap Project Database, and a human biological pathways database called Reactome.
Bedirhan Üstün
CoordinatorClassifications and Terminology
Evidence and Information for Policy
World Health Organization
Geneva, Switzerland
Dr. Üstün has worked in WHO since 1990 first in Mental Health, then in Evidence Cluster as an international health officer and formed multiple international networks on Classification and Assessment of Health and Disability; Mental Health Epidemiology, and Primary Care applications of classification and training programmes. Currently he is responsible for the WHO’s Family of International Classifications (ICD, ICF and other health classifications); and development of standardized health terminologies. Dr. Üstün is the author and co-author of more than 150 articles, several books on psychiatry, primary care, classifications and health assessment.