Ove Wigertz, DSc, D Med

Ove Wigertz is professor emeritus and former chairman of the Dept. of Medical Informatics at both the Health Science Faculty and the Engineering School Faculty at Linkˆping University, Sweden. He was elected Fellow (Foreign Associate) to the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) in 1997. He received a Master of Electrical Engineering degree in 1960 and a Doctor of Science degree in Automatic Control (incl. computer simulation) in 1963 from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. He also received a Doctor of Medical Science degree in Physiology (Work Physiology) in 1971 from Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm. Dr. Wigertz has held positions as teacher, research associate and associate professor at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, and at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, until his move to Linkˆping University in Jan. 1973 to set up one of the first Departments of Medical Informatics in Europe. Other commissions have been as Chairman of the Swedish Association of Academic Professors (1991-1994), Chairman of the Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, Linkˆping University, Linkˆping (1993-1996), Chairman of the Swedish Society of Biomedical Physics and Engineering. (1975-1977) and Chairman of the Swedish Society of Medical Informatics (1978-1981). He has served as a member of the Editorial Boards of "Methods of Information in Medicine", "Computers and Biomedical Research" and "Technology and Health Care". He has been Coeditor of the Proceedings of MEDINFO 83 in Amsterdam in August 1983, and Organizing Committee Chairman of the Conference "Computers in Cardiology 1985" at Linkˆping University. He was Visiting Professor at Tokyo University in 1985 and at the University of Utah in 1986-1987. During the stay in University of Utah he participated actively in the early discussions to create the Arden Syntax for Computerbased Medical Decision Making. Dr. Wigertz has done considerable basic and applied research in Biomedical Engineering and Instrumentation, Cardiovascular and Work Physiology and in several Medical Informatics fields including Knowledge Based Representation, Knowledge Based Systems and Controlled Vocabularies. He is author and co-author of 235 publications. In 1967 Dr. Wigertz received the annual Erna Ebeling Fund Prize from the Swedish Society of Medical Sciences for achievement in the design and development of instruments and systems for physiological research. Together with research associates and students he won the Gold Medal (the prize for one of the three best papers) at MEDINFO 80 in Tokyo, Japan, as well as the Gold Medal (the prize for the best paper) awarded at MEDINFO 95 in Vancouver, Canada.