BETHESDA, MD – The American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) will present the 2020 Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence to Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD, FACMI, Marion V. Nelson Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School, during the Opening Session of the AMIA 2020 Virtual Annual Symposium. AMIA’s Virtual Annual Symposium takes place November 14-18.
In honor of Morris F. Collen, a pioneer in the field of medical informatics, this prestigious award is presented to an individual whose personal commitment and dedication to medical informatics has made a lasting impression on the field. The award is determined by ACMI’s Awards Committee.
“The Morris F. Collen Award is only awarded to the most distinguished informaticians. ACMI is honored to recognize Dr. Kohane for his substantial accomplishments to the field of biomedical informatics,” said ACMI President, William M. Tierney, MD, FACMI, FIAHSI, Professor and Chair, Department of Population Health, Dell Medical School, University of Texas at Austin. “Dr. Kohane has revolutionized many areas of biomedical informatics and has changed the way we practice patient care delivery. He is also an incredibly generous and gifted mentor offering guidance to more than 50 formal trainees, many of whom are ACMI Fellows.”
Dr. Kohane is widely recognized as the lead investigator of a $25M National Center for Biomedical Computing (NCBC): Informatics for Integrating Biology to the Bedside (i2b2). i2b2 is an NIH-funded NCBC based at Partners HealthCare System in Boston. The key challenge that i2b2 is designed to address is that of creating a comprehensive software and methodological framework to enable clinical researchers to accelerate the translation of genomic and “traditional” clinical findings into novel diagnostics, prognostics, and therapeutics. i2b2 provides a technical solution to information exchange across institutions. It is now a standardized component of hundreds of analytic projects all over the world.
He has designed and led multiple internationally adopted efforts to “instrument” the healthcare enterprise for discovery and to enable innovative decision-making tools to be applied to the point of care. The new insights have inspired him and his collaborators to work on re-characterizing and reclassifying diseases such as autism, rheumatoid arthritis, and cancers. In many of these studies, the developmental trajectories of thousands of genes have been a powerful tool in unraveling complex diseases.
Dr. Kohane, MD, PhD, FACMI, has been elected to fellowship in the American College of Medical Informatics, the Society of Pediatric Research, the American Society of Clinical Investigation and was elected a member of the Institute of Medicine. He has previously been honored by AMIA with the Donald A.B. Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics and the William W. Stead Award for Thought Leadership in Informatics.
Dr. Kohane received his Bachelor of Science in Biology from Brown University, and his medical doctorate and PhD from Boston University.
AMIA’s Annual Symposium is the premier educational event in the field. The Symposium presents leading-edge scientific research on biomedical and health informatics, and more than 150 scientific sessions. The work presented spans the spectrum of the informatics field: translational bioinformatics, clinical research informatics, clinical informatics, consumer health informatics and public health informatics.
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AMIA, the leading professional association for informatics professionals, is the center of action for 5,500 informatics professionals from more than 65 countries. As the voice of the nation’s top biomedical and health informatics professionals, AMIA and its members play a leading role in assessing the effect of health innovations on health policy and advancing the field of informatics. AMIA actively supports five domains in informatics: translational bioinformatics, clinical research informatics, clinical informatics, consumer health informatics, and public health informatics.