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2011 Houtchens Award Recipient


Hurdle presenting Houtchens Award to Workman

Dr. John F. Hurdle presented the 2011 Houtchens Award to Liz Workman during a special award seminar on May 6, 2011.   Workman’s primary research interest is in natural language processing; chiefly in library applications (i.e. as an alternative to traditional information retrieval practices). 

A total of eleven papers were blindly submitted for evaluation by selected judges.  Olga Patterson and David Crockett received runner-up recognition for their papers titled Document Clustering of Clinical Narratives: a Systematic Study of Clinical Sublanguages and Comparison of “Gene-by-Gene” and “All-Gene” Algorithms for Predicting Pathogenicity of Uncertain Gene Variants Using Amino Acid Physicochemical Properties respectively.

The Bruce A. Houtchens, MD Award in Medical Informatics and Telemedicine was established and named in memory of Dr. Houtchens, who was a surgeon, physicist, mathematician, aeronautical and astronautical engineer. His main interests included trauma, surgery/critical care, space medicine, and clinical application of telemedicine and medical informatics. The Award was established to open new horizons of medical technology, and to seek better ways of integrating medical technology into medical education and clinical practice. The first award was presented in 1997.