Greenes garners top honors in biomedical informatics

Robert Greenes, chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics, has been selected to receive one of the highest honors in the field of biomedical informatics.

He will be presented the Morris F. Collen Award by the American College of Medical Informatics during the American Medical Informatics Association’s annual symposium in November in Washington, D.C. The award recognizes lifetime achievement and significant contributions to biomedical informatics.

The Department of Biomedical Informatics is in the School of Computing and Informatics, a part of ASU’s Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering.

Greenes will be the second member of the department to earn the Collen Award. It was given in 2006 to Ted Shortliffe, a professor in the biomedical informatics program and dean of University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix in Partnership with Arizona State University.

Greenes came to lead the new department at ASU in 2007, after almost four decades at Harvard University.

He was a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Informatics at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he also has been a professor of health policy and management at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Greenes has an medical degree as well as a doctorate in applied mathematics and computer science, both from Harvard. He is certified in diagnostic radiology and did his residency in the field at Massachusetts General Hospital.

He also has been a radiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

He is a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics as well as its past president, a fellow of the American College of Radiology and a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He serves on the editorial boards of several medical information and management journals.

“It’s a honor to have someone of Bob Greenes’ high stature at the helm of our biomedical informatics department,” says Sethuraman Panchanathan, director of the School of Computing and Informatics. “He richly deserves this recognition that essentially puts him in the informatics hall of fame.”