Our Personnel

Research and Faculty

(Click for Technical Staff)

Jack Smith, MD, PhD

Dr. Smith recently served under an IPA as the first Deputy Director of Medical Informatics and Healthcare Systems at NASA Johnson Space Center. He is a Fellow of the College of Medical Informatics and recipient of a Career Development Award from the National Library of Medicine. His previous research is in the application of models of problem solving, automated reasoning and cognitive science to the understanding of human-computer interaction in healthcare and biomedicine. He has used these approaches to develop a number of applications in decision-support and intelligent tutoring in a variety of domains.

 

Elmer Bernstam, MD, MSE, Director

Dr. Bernstam's CV
Elmer.V.Bernstam@uth.tmc.edu

Dr. Bernstam is Associate Professor in The University of Texas School of Biomedical Informatics at Houston and Internal Medicine at UTHealth. He received his M.D. from the University of Michigan Medical School in 1995 and finished an internal medicine residency in 1998, followed by a Master's in Computer Engineering (University of Michigan) and NLM fellowship in biomedical Informatics (2001) from Stanford. His research focuses on biomedical information retrieval, consumer informatics, decision support and translational biomedical informatics. Dr. Bernstam has served as principal investigator on grants from the National Library of Medicine, Robert Wood Johnson foundation and NASA. He took over as Director of the Informatics component in 2008.

 

William Weems, PhD, Co-Director

biographical sketch
CV & Bibliography
William.A.Weems@uth.tmc.edu

Bill holds several position atUTHealth including the Assistant Vice President of Academic Technology, Associate Dean of Information Technology for the UTHealth Medical School and an Associate Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology and Pharmacology at the UTHealth Medical School. His research interests include the neurophysiology of sympathetic, prevertebral ganglia, production and control of intestinal motility and propulsion, and informatics as a research tool in the study, characterization and management of complex systems. Useful computational solutions suitable for biomedical applications require a globally integrated set of information systems. This recognition has led to his involvement in the development of middleware for integrated applications, participation in electronic publishing, the integration of academic and health care information systems at the application layer, the establishment of the U. T. System Public Key Infrastructure and the U. T. System Identity Management Federation. He served as Co-Chair of the EDUCAUSE PKI for Networked Higher Education Working group for 2003 to 2005 and is currently Co-Chair of the EDUCAUSE Identity Management Working Group and is a member of the U. T. System Identity Management Federation Board.

 

Jiajie Zhang, PhD (Co-Director - human interface)

Dr. Zhang's CV
jiajie.zhang@uth.tmc.edu

Jiajie Zhang is the Doris L. Ross Professor and the Associate Dean of Research at The University of Texas School of Biomedical Informatics at Houston. His research interests include human-centered computing, patient safety, information visualization, decision making, and cognitive science. He has over one hundred peer reviewed publications. He has been the PI or Co-I on many grants from NASA, ONR, Army, NIH, James S. McDonnell Foundation, the State of Texas, and other funding agencies. He is a Fellow of American College of Medical Informatics.

 

Jorge Herskovic, MD, MS, PhD

Jorge.R.Herskovic@uth.tmc.edu

Dr. Herskovic graduated from the Universidad de Chile with a MD in 2002, and obtained his PhD in Health Informatics from The University of Texas School of Biomedical Informatics at Houston in 2008. He is currently an Assistant Professor at SBMI, where he focuses on Biomedical Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing. Dr. Herskovic has published his research in JAMIA and JBI. He is a W.M. Keck Fellow and a Schull Scholar. He has also interned at St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital, and Google. In addition to his research activities, Dr. Herskovic serves as the instructor for the Foundations of Health Informatics I course (an introduction to health informatics).

 

Funda Meric-Bernstam, MD (MDACC)

F. Meric-Bernstam at MDACC Biosketch & Publications
Contact F. Meric-Bernstam

Dr. Meric-Bernstam is a surgeon-scientist at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. She graduated from Yale University School of Medicine (1991), followed by a residency in general surgery at the University of Michigan Medical Center (1998). In the third year of her residency, she joined the National Institutes of Health for a two-year post-doctoral fellowship. She came to M. D. Anderson in 1998 as a surgical oncology fellow and joined the faculty in 2001. She is currently Associate Professor (with tenure) in the Department of Surgical Oncology. Her research focuses on the molecular alterations that play an important role in the development and progression of breast cancer. Specifically, the mTOR (Mammalian Target of Rapamycin) signaling pathway and translational regulation of breast cancer. She also has an interest in breast cancer information online (consumer health informatics). She has served as principle investigator on grants from the National Cancer Institute (K08, R01), Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Goodwin Foundation, Elsa Pardee Foundation and American Institute of Cancer Research.

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