Charles P. Friedman

Prior to joining the ONC Dr. Friedman was Institute Associate Director for Research Informatics and Information Technology at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the NIH, serving as the Institute's Chief Information Officer. Friedman first came to NIH in 2003, in the role of Senior Scholar at the National Library of Medicine, where he coordinated the Library's research program in bioinformatics, was the Library's informatics training officer, and served as NLM's representative to informatics programs in the NIH Roadmap. He also collaborated with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to develop a public-private partnership for training in Public Health Informatics.

From 1996 to 2003, Dr. Friedman was Professor and Associate Vice Chancellor for Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh. At Pittsburgh, he established a health sciences-wide Center for Biomedical Informatics, which subsequently has become a formal academic department of the medical school, with collaborative relationships to all other schools. He established a well-funded program of informatics research and directed the enterprise-wide effort to develop and deploy integrated advanced information resources across the health sciences center. He also established masters and doctoral degree programs in biomedical informatics, and grew the informatics training program to over 40 students.

Dr. Friedman's early career interests combined physics, information technology, educational psychology, and research and evaluation methods. He wrote his first computer program (in Fortran II) in 1966. He holds bachelors and masters degrees in physics from MIT and a PhD in education from the University of North Carolina (UNC). During his doctoral studies, he began to apply these interests and methods to biomedical fields, and served for 19 years (1977-1996) as a faculty member and administrator at the UNC School of Medicine. All of these interests converged over time into a career focus on biomedical informatics. In 1985, he established the Laboratory for Computing and Cognition at UNC, and in 1992, started UNC's medical informatics training program.

Dr. Friedman's recent research has focused on how to build information and knowledge resources that make clinicians, biomedical researchers, and health professional students better at what they do--and how to study the effects of these resources. He has also studied and written about how institutions can organize to make optimal use of their information and knowledge resources.

Dr. Friedman has authored or co-authored over 150 articles in scientific journals. He is the author of a well-known textbook on evaluation methods for biomedical informatics. He is a past president of the American College of Medical Informatics and was the 2005 chair of the Annual Symposium of the American Medical Informatics Association. He currently serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.