Greenes given highest biomedical informatics honor

One of the highest honors in the field of biomedical informatics has been awarded to Robert A. Greenes, professor and Ira A. Fulton Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics, a part of the School of Computing and Informatics in the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering at Arizona State University.

Greenes, an M.D., is the recipient the 2008 Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence presented by the American College of Medical Informatics. Named after one of the pioneers in medical informatics, the award recognizes “an individual whose personal commitment and dedication to medical informatics has made a lasting impression on the field.”

The award announcement cited Greenes’ accomplishments as author and editor of a leading book in the field, “Clinical Decision Support: the Road Ahead,” and his leadership as a member of the Institute of Medicine, past president and Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, and Fellow of the American College of Radiology and the Society of Imaging Informatics in Medicine.

In 1980, Greenes established the Decision Systems Group at the Harvard University-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital, which he then directed for 27 years. The program became widely recognized for its work in data mining and knowledge discovery, knowledge management, decision support, natural language processing and education.

For more than two decades, Greenes was program director of the Boston Biomedical Informatics Research Training Program. He also held the positions as Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Informatics at the Brigham hospital, and Professor of Radiology, Health Sciences and Technology, and Health Policy and Management at Harvard.

The award was presented with a video tribute at the recent American Medical Informatics Association 2008 Annual Symposium in Washington, D.C.