Biography
Edward H. Shortliffe is the Rolf H. Scholdager Professor and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City. He was formerly Professor of Medicine and of Computer Science at Stanford University. After receiving an AB in Applied Mathematics from Harvard College in 1970, he moved to Stanford University where he was awarded a PhD in Medical Information Sciences in 1975 and an MD in 1976. During the early-1970s, he was principal developer of the medical expert system known as MYCIN. After a pause for internal medicine house-staff training at Massachusetts General Hospital and Stanford Hospital between 1976 and 1979, he joined the Stanford internal medicine faculty where he served as Chief of General Internal Medicine from 1988-1995 and directed an active research program in clinical information systems and decision support. He spearheaded the formation of a Stanford graduate degree program in biomedical informatics and divided his time between clinical medicine and biomedical informatics research. In January 2000 he assumed his new post at Columbia University, where he is also Deputy Vice President for Strategic Information Resources (Columbia University Medical Center), Professor of Medicine, Professor of Computer Science, and Director of Medical Informatics for the NewYork-Presbyterian Health Care System. He continues to be closely involved with biomedical informatics graduate training and his research interests include the broad range of issues related to integrated decision-support systems, their effective implementation, and the role of the Internet in health care.
Dr. Shortliffe is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences (where he currently serves on the IOM executive council), the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians, and the American Clinical and Climatological Association. He has also been elected to fellowship in the American College of Medical Informatics and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. He is a Master of the American College of Physicians (ACP) and was a member of that organization’s Board of Regents from 1996-2002.. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics and serves on the editorial boards for several other biomedical informatics publications. He currently sits on the oversight committee for the Division of Engineering and Physical Sciences (National Academy of Sciences) and the Biomedical Informatics Expert Panel (National Center for Research Resources at the National Institutes of Health). He has recently served on the National Committee for Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS), on the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), and as an Advisor to the Internet II Project. Earlier he served on the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (National Research Council), the Biomedical Library Review Committee (National Library of Medicine), and was recipient of a research career development award from the latter agency. In addition, he received the Grace Murray Hopper Award of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1976 and has been a Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation Faculty Scholar in General Internal Medicine. Dr. Shortliffe has authored over 230 articles and books in the fields of medical computing and artificial intelligence. Volumes include Computer-Based Medical Consultations: MYCIN (Elsevier/North Holland, 1976), Readings in Medical Artificial Intelligence: the First Decade (with W.J. Clancey; Addison-Wesley, 1984), Rule-Based Expert Systems: The MYCIN Experiments of the Stanford Heuristic Programming Project (with B.G. Buchanan; Addison-Wesley, 1984), Medical Informatics: Computer Applications in Health Care and Biomedicine (with L.E. Perreault, G. Wiederhold, and L.M. Fagan; Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1990; 2nd edition, New York: Springer-Verlag, 2000), and the third edition of the latter textbook (Biomedical Informatics: Computer Applications in Health Care
