Dr. Karen Eilbeck
Dr. Les Lenert
Two new faculty join Biomedical Informatics in Fall 2010.
Karen Eilbeck, PhD joined our department August 1, 2010. She has a PhD in biochemistry and has done postdoctoral work in computer science at the University of Manchester working with a great group of ontologists and knowledge representation faculty. Her concentration was on bioinformatics. She worked for Celera Genomics as a bioinformatician for several years, and then joined the University of California Berkeley group working on Gene Ontology. She built on that work to develop the Sequence Ontology and serve as the chief architect. The Sequence Ontology is a way to represent the features of genes and other DNA features, and now is used as a method to represent the variations in sequence of model organisms and also the human genome sequence. She works on other ontologies including the RNA ontology, the ontology working group of the NIAID, and the Formal Ontology Group as part of the OBO (Open Biological Ontologies). She has been an adjunct member of our faculty for several years in her prior position as research faculty in the Department of Human Genetics. She joined our department as a tenure track assistant professor. She will be teaching the Fundamentals of Bioinformatics course (BMI 6030) this Fall.
Les Lenert, MD, MS joined our Department in September 2010. He comes to us most recently from the CDC where he served as the Director of the National Center for Public Health Informatics (NCPHI). He has a joint appointment as a professor of both Biomedical Informatics and Internal Medicine. He serves as the associate chair for ambulatory care within the Department of Internal Medicine, and is developing a model of the patient centered medical home within their clinic structure. Dr. Lenert has a MS in Biomedical Informatics from Stanford University and also did a clinical fellowship in clinical pharmacology in addition to his work as an internist. He has served on the faculty of Stanford University and also the University of California, San Diego and has worked in the VA system extensively. His research publications are highly cited and focus on a variety of topics that relate to Biomedical Informatics, Public Health Informatics, Clinical Informatics, Health Services Research, and Clinical Pharmacology. He is an elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI).