Riccardo Bellazzi, PhD

Dr Bellazzi graduated laurea cum laude with a degree in Electronics Engineering from the University of Pavia in Italy, with a concentration in planning and temporal reasoning in medical expert systems. He earned his PhD in Bioengineering at the Milan Politecnico and the University of Pavia, with emphasis on causal models and machine learning applied to clinical monitoring. Dr Bellazzi is currently Associate Professor of Medical Informatics in the Department of Computer Science and Systems (Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica), Universit‡ di Pavia, Pavia, Italy. At the time of his election to the College, Professor Bellazzi was a lecturer in Medical Informatics, Machine Learning, Probabilistic Modeling and Bioinformatics applied to genomics and proteomics. He organized the National School of Bioengineering in 2007 with an educational program focused on Computational Genomics and Proteomics. Dr Bellazzi's research interests range across clinical and molecular domains, including data mining, web-based telemedicine for the management of chronic disease, mathematical modeling of biological systems, and the development of novel bioinformatics methods, particularly in the temporal analysis of gene expression patterns, proteomics and analysis of tissue microarray data. He has authored more than 200 publications, and has been an active contributor to both AMIA and IMIA conferences. He was an AMIA Student Paper award winner for work associated with his PhD thesis in 1992. Dr Riccardo Bellazzi is one of the renaissance figures of our field, whose work is having international impact in the emerging field of clinical bioinformatics. He will be the scientific program chair for Medinfo 2010 in Capetown, South Africa. His election to the College as an International Fellow recognizes these technical and organizational achievements that have had impact both in his own country and in the Americas.