Fellowship Award to BMI Associate Director

Elizabeth Robboy Kittrie, Associate Director of Biomedical Informatics, has been awarded a fellowship to attend the NLM-sponsored Woods Hole Course on Biomedical Informatics at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts this summer. 

The week long survey course, which admits only 30 fellows from a large number of applicants, has been held annually since 1991. The course is geared towards medical educators, librarians, and administrators, as well as new faculty who can become agents of change in their institutions. It consists of a combination of lectures and hands-on computer exercises designed to introduce the students to both conceptual and technical components of medical informatics.

The presentations and classes, which include such topics as, What is Medical Informatics?, Bioinformatics: Past, Present and Future Perspectives, Clinical Information Systems, Building Web Interfaces to Databases, and Managing Technological Change, are taught by nationally renowned faculty from a diverse array of organizations and universities. Several of the teachers, for example, Dr. Joyce Mitchell and Dr. Suzanne Bakken, are members of our Advisory Board. The goal of the course is to prepare the students to make informed decisions about computer-based tools in their own organizational environments.

Ms. Kittrie’s goal is to assist the Department of Biomedical Informatics in becoming a world-class program. Attending this course is just one step in achieving that goal. Ms. Kittrie brings expertise in planning and leadership to the department through her former roles as Senior Policy and Planning Analyst for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and a Project Leader at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. By furthering her understanding of the field of biomedical informatics she will gain an added advantage in her role as one of the designers of the Biomedical Informatics Department.

Ms. Kittrie is very excited about this opportunity stating “This NLM-sponsored Course on Biomedical Informatics is particularly appealing to me because of its hands-on nature and opportunity to work closely with national leaders in the field. I am eager to increase my technical knowledge in the field of biomedical informatics, to meet and interact with other professionals in the field, and to have the opportunity to establish collaborations between ASU and bioinformaticians at universities and institutes across the country.”