Joel Saltz, MD, PhD

Dr. Saltz received his Bachelors degree in Mathematics and Physics, and Masters degree in Mathematics from the University of Michigan, and an MD and PhD in computer science from Duke. His computer science training led him to a faculty position in the Department of Computer Science at Yale, and to NASA's Langley research facility where he was lead computer scientist from 1989 to 1992. He returned to academia as Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, and then back to academic medicine for a residency in Clinical Pathology at Johns Hopkins. After completion of his residency he joined the Pathology faculty at Hopkins working in the area of pathology informatics and image analysis. In 2001, he was named Professor and chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Ohio State, and Associate Vice-President for Health Sciences. In 2008, became Director of the Center for Comprehensive Informatics and Chief Medical Information Officer at Emory University, with a goal of starting a Biomedical Informatics Department as a joint venture between Emory and Georgia Tech. He will be the Founding Department Chair there. Dr. Saltz has applied parallel computing approaches to a wide variety of biomedically relevant problems, and has been a strong proponent of grid computing architectures. As the CaBIG principal investigator at Ohio State, he was a key designer of the architectures for grid computing that have been deployed within the CaBIG Community. He was the biomedical informatics lead for Ohio State's successful Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) application, and guided the adaptation of CaBIG grid infrastructures for the CTSA. His research support has come from a variety of sponsors including the Department of Energy for Computational Biology, NIH for Image Mining, and NSF for High-end parallel and grid computing. In the course of his computational and biomedical informatics activities he has amassed more than 320 peer reviewed publications. Over the years Dr. Salz has created a variety of technical innovations around the idea of the Virtual Microscope, which is a set of parallel, grid-based image viewing and manipulation applications. His election to the College recognizes these technical and organizational achievements.