The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), is a public land-grant research university in San Francisco, California, United States. It is part of the University of California system and is dedicated entirely to health science and life science. It conducts research and teaching in medical and biological sciences.
The Program in Liberal Medical Education, or PLME, is an eight-year combined baccalaureate-M.D. medical program offered by Brown University. Members of the program are simultaneously accepted into both the undergraduate College of Brown University as well as the Warren Alpert Medical School, allowing them to receive a Bachelor's degree and an M.D. as part of a single eight-year continuum. The PLME is the only combined medical program in the Ivy League, as well as one of only approximately 120 in the nation. The program is highly selective, admitting fewer than 90 applicants nationwide and internationally each year, with an acceptance rate of 2.19% for the class of 2026. The PLME is widely considered to be one of the most competitive and prestigious combined medical programs in the country.
Joseph Lyman DeRisi is an American biochemist, specializing in molecular biology, parasitology, genomics, virology, and computational biology.
Edward ("Ted") Hance Shortliffe is a Canadian-born American biomedical informatician, physician, and computer scientist. Shortliffe is a pioneer in the use of artificial intelligence in medicine. He was the principal developer of the clinical expert system MYCIN, one of the first rule-based artificial intelligence expert systems, which obtained clinical data interactively from a physician user and was used to diagnose and recommend treatment for severe infections. While never used in practice, its performance was shown to be comparable to and sometimes more accurate than that of Stanford infectious disease faculty. This spurred the development of a wide range of activity in the development of rule-based expert systems, knowledge representation, belief nets and other areas, and its design greatly influenced the subsequent development of computing in medicine.
Russ Biagio Altman is an American professor of bioengineering, genetics, medicine, and biomedical data science and past chairman of the bioengineering department at Stanford University.
Homer Richards Warner was an American cardiologist who was an early proponent of medical informatics who pioneered many aspects of computer applications to medicine. Author of the book, Computer-Assisted Medical Decision-Making, published in 1979, he served as CIO for the University of Utah Health Sciences Center, as president of the American College of Medical Informatics, and was actively involved with the National Institutes of Health. He was first chair of the Department of Medical Informatics at the University of Utah School of Medicine, the first American medical program to formally offer a degree in medical informatics.
Sue Desmond-Hellmann is an American oncologist and biotechnology leader who served as the Chief Executive Officer of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation from 2014 to 2020. In March 2024 she was elected as a board member of OpenAI. She was previously Chancellor of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), the first woman to hold the position, and Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Distinguished Professor, and before that president of product development at Genentech, where she played a role in the development of the first gene-targeted cancer drugs, Avastin and Herceptin.
Translational bioinformatics (TBI) is a field that emerged in the 2010s to study health informatics, focused on the convergence of molecular bioinformatics, biostatistics, statistical genetics and clinical informatics. Its focus is on applying informatics methodology to the increasing amount of biomedical and genomic data to formulate knowledge and medical tools, which can be utilized by scientists, clinicians, and patients. Furthermore, it involves applying biomedical research to improve human health through the use of computer-based information system. TBI employs data mining and analyzing biomedical informatics in order to generate clinical knowledge for application. Clinical knowledge includes finding similarities in patient populations, interpreting biological information to suggest therapy treatments and predict health outcomes.
Donald Allen Bror Lindberg was the Director of the United States National Library of Medicine from 1984 until his retirement in 2015. He was known for his work in medical computing, especially the development of PubMed. He won the 1997 Morris F. Collen Award from the American College of Medical Informatics.
Roni F. Zeiger is an American physician and technologist. He is notable for his work as the Chief Health Strategist (2006–2012) at Google where he developed Google Health and Google Flu Trends. He is a co-founder of the Smart Patients project. In 2019, Zeiger announced he would be joining Facebook as the Head of Health Strategy.
Gary Stormo is an American geneticist and currently Joseph Erlanger Professor in the Department of Genetics and the Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis. He is considered one of the pioneers of bioinformatics and genomics. His research combines experimental and computational approaches in order to identify and predict regulatory sequences in DNA and RNA, and their contributions to the regulatory networks that control gene expression.
The UCSF School of Medicine is the medical school of the University of California, San Francisco and is located at the base of Mount Sutro on the Parnassus Heights campus in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1864 by Hugh Toland, it is the oldest medical school in California and in the western United States.
Euan Angus Ashley is a Scottish physician, scientist, author, and founder based at Stanford University in California where he is Associate Dean in the School of Medicine and holds the Roger and Joelle Burnell Chair of Genomics and Precision Health. He is known for helping establish the field of medical genomics.
Dean Forrest Sittig is an American biomedical informatician specializing in clinical informatics. He is a professor in Biomedical Informatics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and Executive Director of the Clinical Informatics Research Collaborative (CIRCLE). Sittig was elected as a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics in 1992, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society in 2011, and was a founding member of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics in 2017. Since 2004, he has worked with Joan S. Ash, a professor at Oregon Health & Science University to interview several Pioneers in Medical Informatics, including G. Octo Barnett, MD, Morris F. Collen, MD, Donald E. Detmer, MD, Donald A. B. Lindberg, MD, Nina W. Matheson, ML, DSc, Clement J. McDonald, MD, and Homer R. Warner, MD, PhD.
Katherine Snowden Pollard is the Director of the Gladstone Institute of Data Science and Biotechnology and a professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She is a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator. She was awarded Fellowship of the International Society for Computational Biology in 2020 and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2021 for outstanding contributions to computational biology and bioinformatics.
Nicholas Pierino Tatonetti is an American bioscientist who is Vice Chair of Operations in the Department of Computational Biomedicine and Associate Director of Computational Oncology in the Cancer Center at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California.
Morris Frank Collen was founder of the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research and an original member of the Permanente Medical Group, pioneering developer of Automated Multiphasic Health Testing (AMHT) systems, and Electronic Health Records (EHRs) for Public Health and Clinical Screening, serving as a model for pre-paid healthcare at the national level. Collen was a Founder of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) in 1984, and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) in 1989. The Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence was established in his honor by ACMI in 1993. In 1971 Collen was elected a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.
Suzanne B. Bakken Henry is an American nurse who is a professor of biomedical informatics at Columbia University. Her research considers health equity and informatics. She is a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, American College of Medical Informatics and American Academy of Nursing.
Charles Safran is an American-born physician, biomedical informatician, and professor, who is known for his work regarding the use of health information technology (HIT) to improve the delivery and quality of healthcare, in particular clinical information systems.
Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence is the highest honor presented by the American College of Medical Informatics. It is awarded annually to "an individual whose personal commitment and dedication to biomedical informatics has made a lasting impression on healthcare and biomedicine". The award was established in 1993 to honor Morris F. Collen, the founder of biomedical informatics, and was also the recipient of the first year's award. Recipients of this award have made significant contributions to medical informatics research, education, or leadership, advancing healthcare through innovative uses of information technology.
