BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Edward H. Shortliffe
Professor and Chair
Department of Medical Informatics
Professor of Medicine
Professor of Computer Science
Columbia University


Edward H. Shortliffe is Professor and Chair of the Department of Medical Informatics at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City.  He was formerly Professor of Medicine and of Computer Science at Stanford University.  He received an AB in Applied Mathematics from Harvard College in 1970, a Stanford PhD in Medical Information Sciences in 1975, and an MD at Stanford 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 Harvard and Stanford between 1976 and 1979, he joined the Stanford internal medicine faculty where he served as Chief of General Internal Medicine from 1988-1995 and directed an active research program in clinical information systems development.  He spearheaded the formation of a Stanford graduate degree program in medical informatics and divided his time between clinical medicine and medical-informatics research.  In January 2000 he assumed his new post at Columbia University, where he is also Associate Vice President for Strategic Information Planning for the Health Sciences, Professor of Medicine, Professor of Computer Science, and Chief of Clinical Information Services for the New York-Presbyterian Health Care System.  He continues to be closely involved with medical informatics graduate training and 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 a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences (where he 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, the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and the American College of Physicians -- American Society of Internal Medicine (ACP-ASIM).  He is a member of the Board of Regents of the ACP-ASIM, is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics,  and serves on the editorial boards for several other medical informatics publications.  He currently sits on the Presidential Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), the National Committee for Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS), and has served as an Advisor for the Internet II Project.  He has also 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 230 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), and 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).