Dr William Hersh (Course Lecturer and Tutor)
Professor and Chair, Dept of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology, Oregon Health and Science University, USA
William Hersh, M.D., is Professor and Chair of the Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology in the School of Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) in Portland, Oregon, USA. Dr. Hersh is a leader and innovator in biomedical informatics both in education and research.
In education, Dr. Hersh serves as Director of Informatics Educational Programs at OHSU, where he has led the development of educational programs at the certificate, master’s, and doctoral levels. He also initiated OHSU’s efforts into distance learning for biomedical informatics. Most recently, he teamed up with the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) to launch the 10×10 program that aims to train 10,000 clinicians and others in informatics by the year 2010.
In research, Dr. Hersh’s main focus has been in the area of information retrieval, where he has authored over 100 scientific papers as well as the book, Information Retrieval: A Health & Biomedical Perspective. Dr. Hersh is also active in clinical and translational research informatics. He serves as Director of the Biomedical Informatics Program of the Oregon Clinical & Translational Research Institute (OCTRI, www.octri.org) and is Chair of the National Informatics Steering Committee of the Clinical & Translational Science Award (CTSA) program of the National Institutes of Health.
More information about Dr. Hersh can be found on his Web site at www.billhersh.info
Dr K C Lun
CEO, Gateway Consulting & formerly Professorial Fellow, Dept of Information Systems, NUS School of Computing (last academic appointment prior to retirement in Dec 2014)
Dr K C Lun is a pioneer of medical informatics in Asia. Since presenting his first scientific paper at MEDINFO 86 in Washington DC, his accomplishments in the field include hosting the financially successful World Congress of Health and Medical Informatics, MEDINFO 89 in Singapore in 1989, chairing the Editorial Committee for MEDINFO 92 in Geneva, founding the Asia Pacific Association for Medical Informatics (APAMI) in 1994 and assuming the IMIA Presidency in 2001. For 26 years, Dr Lun served on the NUS Faculty of Medicine and held positions as Director of the NSTB (now A-STAR)-funded Medical Informatics Research Programme (1996-2001) and Director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Health Informatics (1990-2001). His pioneering efforts in medical e-learning at NUS won him the Teaching Excellence Award in 1998. He is also credited as the creator of Cyberspace Hospital, the first virtual hospital on the World Wide Web, launched in 1995. In 2001, he left NUS to join the Nanyang Technological University to help start its School of Biological Sciences, serving as its founding Vice-Dean (Academic) and later, NTU Dean of Admissions in 2005.
Dr Lun has undertaken consultancies in biostatistics and health informatics for WHO, IMIA, IDRC, UNDP and several other international agencies. He has also served as Editor (Asia Pacific) of the International Journal of Medical Informatics as well as editorial board member of the IJMI and Methods of Information in Medicine.
For his contributions to the development of medical informatics nationally and internationally, Dr Lun was awarded the Singapore Internationale Award in 2001 and the Excellence for Singapore Award in 2002. After a rewarding career in academia spanning over 30 years, Dr Lun set up Gateway Consulting in October 2006 to keep himself active in retirement.
More information about Dr. Lun can be found on his Web site at www.gatewaypl.com/lun