Department of Biomedical Informatics - University of Pittsburgh

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INFORMATICS IN PUBLIC HEALTH SUBJECT OF UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH LINDBERG SYMPOSIUM

“Informatics in Public Health,” this year’s Donald A. B. Lindberg Lecture and Symposium sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Biomedical Informatics and the Graduate School of Public Health (GSPH), discussed informatics in surveillance, epidemic models and other aspects of public health practice. The symposium took place on Thursday, May 8 at the University of Pittsburgh.

The Donald A. B. Lindberg Lecture, “Real Time Biosurveillance: Into Maturity or Obscurity?” was presented by Leslie Lenert, MD, MS, director of the National Center for Public Health Informatics (NCPHI) at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At the NCPHI, Dr. Lenert is responsible for improving health practice through the advancement of the science of biomedical information systems. He is a member of the editorial boards of Medical Decision Making, the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association and Journal of Biomedical Informatics. He is also a member of the Agency for Health Research and Policy’s Healthcare Technology and Decision Sciences study section. In 2002, Dr. Lenert was appointed to the American College of Medical Informatics, in recognition of his work in the field of informatics.

Following Dr. Lenert’s lecture, Donald S. Burke, MD, Dean of GSPH and UPMC-Jonas Salk Professor of Global Health, presented a lecture titled, “The Epidemiological Dynamics of Influenza in Pittsburgh.” Michael Wagner, MD, PhD, associate professor of biomedical informatics and intelligent systems, and director of the Real Time Outbreak and Disease Surveillance (RODS) Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh presented a lecture during the morning session entitled, “Informatics in Biosurveillance: A Ten-Year Retrospective.”

The afternoon session featured the following presentations:

  • Kirsten Waller, MD, M.P.H., surveillance section leader, Division of Disease Epidemiology, Pennsylvania Department of Health
  • “Environmental Public Health Tracking: Past, Present and Future,” by Evelyn O. Talbott, Dr.P.H., professor, Department of Epidemiology, GSPH
  • “The Bayesian Aerosol Release Detector,” by William R. Hogan, MD, MS, associate professor of biomedical informatics, University of Pittsburgh, and director, Medical Vocabulary/Ontology Services, UPMC
  • “Case Detection/NLP,” by Rich Tsui, PhD, research assistant professor of biomedical informatics and intelligent systems, and associate director, RODS Laboratory, University of Pittsburgh
  • “Bayesian Biosurveillance,” by Gregory F. Cooper, MD, PhD, associate professor of biomedical informatics, computer science and intelligent systems and vice chair, Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Pittsburgh
  • “Multivariate Outbreak Detection and Characterization,” by Daniel B. Neill, PhD, assistant professor of information systems, Heinz School of Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University

Established in 1997, the Donald A. B. Lindberg Lecture addresses key issues in biomedical informatics and is named for Donald A. B. Lindberg, MD, who continues to pioneer the development of advanced information systems as director of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

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