Center for Biomedical Informatics Advisory Committee
The advisory committee is composed of compassionate and energetic academic, nonprofit, and corporate leaders who will help to establish the strategic direction of the Center. The mission of the Advisory Committee is to support the Center in: 1) gaining a national reputation as a biomedical informatics center dedicated to eliminating health disparities; and 2) transforming the informatics workforce by educating a diverse group of students who understand health information technology and the transformative role it can play in addressing the problems faced by medically underserved and under-resourced communities. Committee members are listed below.

Irene Dankwa-Mullan is an industry scientist and physician with nearly two decades of experience in clinical research, public health, disparities and population health. Dr. Dankwa-Mullan is Deputy Chief Health Officer and Chief Health Equity Officer at IBM Watson Health. In her role she is responsible for ensuring scientific evidence for Watson Health solutions, and advancing the IBM鈥檚 initiatives around racial justice, health equity, AI bias and data fairness. She spent nearly a decade delivering and managing front-line primary care, preventive services, and community-based clinical research as a physician administrator and medical director. Prior to joining IBM, she was at the National Institutes of Health, where she served as Director, Office of Innovation and Program Coordination and then as Deputy Director for Division of Scientific Programs within the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. While at the NIH, she was an active member on several key strategic boards and committees, including many that were cross-sectoral and transdisciplinary. She was awarded the first NIH Directors award for exceptional contribution to advancing science of health disparities. She has lectured in clinical research, and mentored several early research investigators, supported scientific publications and is lead editor for the authoritative textbook, The Science of Health Disparities Research to be published by Wiley in 2020.
Dr. Dankwa-Mullan attended Barnard College, earned her MD from Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine, and completed her internal medicine internship and residency at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. She also obtained a Master鈥檚 degree in Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Biostatistics from the Yale School of Public Health.

Robert Greenes is Emeritus Professor at Arizona State University (ASU) and the Mayo Clinic, having moved to San Diego, CA, in August 2020. Dr. Greenes joined ASU in 2007 to lead the then new Department of Biomedical Informatics (BMI). This unit, originally in the School of Computing and Informatics, in the Fulton School of Engineering, and for three years reporting directly to the Provost’s Office, became part of the College of Health Solutions in 2012. Following a sabbatical in 2013-2014, to work on creating a collaboration initiative for interoperable healthcare apps, he returned to ASU as the Ira A. Fulton Chair of Biomedical Informatics.
Before moving to ASU, Dr. Greenes spent many years at Harvard, in the field of BMI, first at Massachusetts General Hospital, then at Brigham and Women鈥檚 Hospital, where he established the Decision Systems Group in 1980, and developed it into a leading BMI research and development program. Dr. Greenes was professor of radiology and of health sciences and technology (HST), at Harvard Medical School, where HST is a joint division of Harvard and MIT. He was also professor of health policy and management at Harvard School of Public Health. For more than 20 years, he directed the Biomedical Informatics Research Training (BIRT) program, with support from the National Library of Medicine and other sources, with co-directors that, when he left Boston, represented 10 hospital and university-based informatics groups throughout the Boston area.
One of Dr. Greenes’ earliest contributions was in the 1960’s while a medical student and PhD student at Harvard, when he was co-developer of the MUMPS language and system, which has gone on to become one of the most widely used computer platforms in health information technology throughout the world to this day. Dr. Greenes has been a practicing radiologist, and also had brief interludes in industry and at Stanford. Dr. Greenes鈥 research has been in the areas of clinical decision support, in terms of models and approaches for decision making, the knowledge representation to support it, and its clinical application and validation. He has also been active in the promulgation of standards and fostering of group collaborative work, particularly in knowledge management. A related research interest is human-computer interaction, and workflow optimization, particularly with respect to the use of clinical information systems by providers and patients, the improved capture of clinical data and the incorporation of individualized, context-specific decision support. Another interest is in personal biosensors for monitoring of patients at risk in a variety of settings. In recent years he has directed an initiative focused on establishing a platform for interoperable apps to foster health care systems innovation. Having authored over 250 peer-reviewed publications, he is also author of the leading textbook on computer-based clinical decision support (from Elsevier), with its third edition now underway.
Dr. Greenes is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics, and a Fellow of the American College of Radiology, American College of Medical Informatics, and the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine. He was the 2008 recipient of the Morris F. Collen Award for lifetime impact on the field of biomedical informatics, from the American College of Medical Informatics. He is former Chair of the Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine.

Linda Griego鈥檚 career uniquely melds community/public service with private enterprise.
Presently, she serves as chair of the MLK Health & Wellness Community Development Corporation (see ), which she founded in 2015. The primary focus of MLK-CDC is revitalization of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Medical Campus, located in the Watts/Willowbrook neighborhood of South Los Angeles, including the new Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital. She also serves as trustee of the 海角社区 of Science and Medicine, also located on Campus, and has been actively involved in the University鈥檚 expansion plans. Previously, she served on the board of directors of the new Hospital, and she founded its charitable foundation (see ). Most recently, Ms. Griego was appointed by the LA County Board of Supervisor to serve on the LA County Economic & Resiliency Task Force charged with economic recovery efforts during the Covid-19 pandemic.
For more than two decades, Ms. Griego has served on boards of directors of private and publicly-held corporations, including current service on the boards of ViacomCBS and American Fund/Capital Group. She previously served on the boards of directors of AECOM, Granite Construction Inc., Southwest Water Company, Blockbuster, Inc., City National Bank, Tokai Bank and First Interstate Bank. She was also a Los Angeles director of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
In 1986 she founded Griego Enterprises, Inc., a business management company that has overseen entrepreneurial ventures in Los Angeles and New Mexico, including:
- The acquisition, redevelopment and renovation of an historic 1912 firehouse in downtown Los Angeles into offices and a prominent restaurant, Engine Co. No. 28;
- Successful operation of the Engine Co. No. 28 restaurant for over 20 years, after which it was sold, together with the building, and remains in operation;
- Development and sale of the Red Car Grill in West Hollywood;
- Acquisition, development and renovation of the Oso Ranch & Lodge in Chama, New Mexico, as a hospitality operation; and
- Creation of a new Basque bakery/caf茅 concept, Etchea, with two locations in downtown LA.
For over two decades, Ms. Griego was active in Los Angeles civic affairs focused on economic development. She served as Deputy Mayor of Los Angeles in the Tom Bradley Administration. She was President and CEO of the Los Angeles Community Development Bank, charged with making loans in the federal LA economic empowerment zone; and President and CEO of Rebuild LA, the agency created to coordinate a five-year economic recovery following the 1992 Los Angeles civil unrest.
Ms. Griego has been involved in philanthropy for over 25 years, including past service on the boards of trustees of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; the David and Lucile Packard Foundation; the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation; and the California Community Foundation. She has also served on the several boards of directors of the non-profit organizations including the YMCA of Greater Metropolitan Los Angeles, the German Marshall Fund, the Mexican American Legal Defense & Education Fund, Art Center College of Design, Scripps College, KCET, Public Counsel, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Community Development Technologies Center (Rebuild LA鈥檚 successor), the World Affairs Council, Tomas Rivera Policy Institute and the Public Policy Institute of California. She has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations since 1995, and she is a founding member and director of the Pacific Council on International Policy.
Ms. Griego has been recognized for her civic and community leadership by the City and County of Los Angeles, as well as by charitable organizations, including the Hispanics in Philanthropy, YMCA of Greater Metropolitan Los Angeles, MALDEF, the Anti-Defamation League, CORO Southern California, the White House Fellows Commission, San Francisco Hispanic Foundation, the Edmund G. Brown Institute of Public Affairs, the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce and the City of Hope. Ms. Griego has been featured in Hispanic Executive and Latino Leaders publications.
Ms. Griego has maintained strong ties with UCLA since her graduation in 1975, when she was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in History. She is a former senior fellow of the UCLA School of Public Policy. She serves on the UCLA Women鈥檚 Health Center advisory board. In 2008, she received the UCLA Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the University.
Born and raised in Tucumcari, New Mexico, Ms. Griego comes from a Mexican-American family of professional bakers and railroad workers. Following graduation from high school, Ms. Griego moved to Washington, D.C. to work for her hometown member of congress. She later worked for U. S. Senator Alan Cranston of California. In the 1970s, she was recruited by PacBell in its program to diversify its management, starting as supervisor of a telephone installation and repair crew and soon promoted to manage all crews operating out of a garage in Southern California.

Kevin B. Johnson is Informatician-in-Chief, Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor and Chair of Biomedical Informatics, and Professor of Pediatrics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He received his MD from Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and his MS in Medical Informatics from Stanford University. In 1992 he returned to Johns Hopkins where he served as a Pediatric Chief Resident. He was a member of the faculty in both Pediatrics and Biomedical Information Sciences at Johns Hopkins until 2002, when he was recruited to Vanderbilt University. He also is a board-certified Pediatrician.
Dr. Johnson is an internationally respected developer and evaluator of clinical information technology. His research interests have been related to developing and encouraging the adoption of clinical information systems to improve patient safety and compliance with practice guidelines; the uses of advanced computer technologies, including the Web, personal digital assistants, and pen-based computers in medicine; and the development of computer-based documentation systems for the point of care. In the early phases of his career, he directed the development and evaluation of evidence-based pediatric care guidelines for The Johns Hopkins Hospital. He has been principal investigator on numerous grants and has been an invited speaker at most major medical informatics and pediatrics conferences. He also was the Chief Informatics Officer at Vanderbilt University Medical Center from 2015-2019.
He is the author of over 130 publications and books or book chapters. He is a member of the VUMC Academy for Excellence in Education. Nationally, he directs the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Library of Medicine, is a member of the Council of Councils for the NIH, leads the American Board of Pediatrics Information Advisory Committee, and is member of the National Advisory Committee for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program. He has held numerous other leadership positions throughout his career.
He has received various prestigious awards. He was elected into the American College of Medical Informatics in 2004, The Academic Pediatric Society in 2010, the National Academy of Medicine (Institute of Medicine) in 2010, the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Society of Scholars in 2014, and Vanderbilt University鈥檚 Alexander Heard Distinguished Service Professor award in 2017, and was inducted into the Nashville Technology Council Hall of Fame in 2018.

Edward H. Shortliffe is Chair Emeritus and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University鈥檚 Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. He is also Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Informatics in the College of Health Solutions at Arizona State University and Adjunct Professor of Population Health Sciences (Health Informatics) at Weill Cornell Medical College. Previously he served as President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Medical Informatics Association. He has also held academic appointments at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in Houston, and the University of Arizona, He chaired the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia (2000-2007), and the Section on Medical Informatics at Stanford University (1979-2000). He has spearheaded the formation and evolution of graduate degree programs in biomedical informatics at Stanford, Columbia, and Arizona State University. Both a PhD computer scientist and a physician who has practiced internal medicine, Dr. Shortliffe is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. He has also been elected to fellowship in the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. A Master of the American College of Physicians, he received the Association of Computing Machinery鈥檚 Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1976 and ACMI鈥檚 Morris F. Collen Award in 2006. Editor Emeritus of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics and editor of a well-known textbook on Biomedical Informatics (now in its fifth edition), Dr. Shortliffe has authored over 350 articles and books in the fields of biomedical computing and artificial intelligence.

Scott Weingarten is Chief Clinical and Innovation Officer at Premier and Chief Executive Officer of Stanson Health, a Premier Company. Dr. Weingarten is a Professor of Medicine at Cedars-Sinai and consultant to the CEO at Cedars-Sinai. He is also a Health Sciences Clinical Professor of Medicine (Level 5) at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. In his prior position, he was Senior Vice President and Chief Clinical Transformation Officer at Cedars-Sinai.
Board-certified in internal medicine and a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, Dr. Weingarten has published approximately 100 articles and editorials on healthcare quality improvement, clinical decision support, and related topics, and has authored a number of chapters on improving the quality of patient care in leading internal medicine textbooks. He is a New England Journal of Medicine Catalyst 鈥淭hought Leader.鈥
Dr. Weingarten was a member of the National Academy of Medicine鈥檚 Committee on Clinical Decision Support. He is currently a Board of Director for the Scottsdale Institute. At Cedars-Sinai, he has received the President鈥檚 Award, the Golden Apple Teaching Award (as determined by the medical residents), and the Alumnus of the Year (as determined by the Medical Staff).
Scott was the co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairman of the Board of Stanson Health. Dr. Weingarten was the co-founder, president and chief executive officer of Zynx Health, which was the leader for order sets and care plans for electronic health records. He is a co-inventor of three software patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
After graduating from UCLA鈥檚 medical school, Dr. Weingarten completed his internship, residency and fellowship in internal medicine at Cedars-Sinai. He later participated in a National Center for Health Services Research Fellowship at the RAND/UCLA Center for Health Policy Study.
Dr. Weingarten has also worked as a primary care physician at Kaiser Permanente Woodland Hills as part of the Southern California Permanente Medical Group.
He is a Board member for the Downtown Women鈥檚 Center (DWC) which houses and feeds homeless women in downtown Los Angeles. He is a Trustee of 海角社区 in Los Angeles, the second most diverse four-year private nonprofit college in the United States.

James N. Weinstein joined Microsoft in July 2018 as Senior Vice President, Microsoft Healthcare, leading strategy and innovation. Dr. Weinstein is the immediate past Chief Executive Officer and President of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health. The multi-billion dollar system includes New Hampshire’s only academic medical center and a network of affiliated hospitals and clinics across Vermont and New Hampshire, serving a patient population of about 2 million. Under his leadership, Dartmouth-Hitchcock worked to create a 鈥渟ustainable health system鈥 for the patients and communities it serves, for generations to come. As leader of a bi-state health system, he created an operating model based in population health locally and nationally. The system went from 1 hospital to 7 and the quality was in the top 1% of the country and opened a state-of-the-art Hospice Center. He created a joint venture with Harvard-Pilgrim to create a new health plan for Northern New England. He worked with Congress during three Presidental administrations. He helped lead the ACO population-based strategies and led national efforts in Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) and Health Equity. In 2010 Epic adopted his PROMs from the DHMC Spine Center model to implement for all patients as an Epic product. He built partnerships with a variety of providers throughout northern New England and across the United States, to deliver optimum care at lowest cost to patients in the region. Immediately prior to becoming CEO in 2011, Dr. Weinstein served as President of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Clinic, leader of the physicians across the Dartmouth-Hitchcock system, and was Director of The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice (TDI), home of the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care. For decades, the Atlas has documented the ongoing variations in health care delivery across the United States. His dual positions as Clinic President and TDI Director allowed him to build critical linkages between the groundbreaking health services research of TDI and the clinical care at Dartmouth-Hitchcock and nationally, with a focus on better understanding and meeting the population health needs of the region Dartmouth-Hitchcock serves and the nation.
During his time as Director of TDI, Dr. Weinstein co-founded, with then Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim (past President of the World Bank), the, a collaboration between TDI and the Tuck School of Business, and the first hybrid residential and distance learning degree program at Dartmouth. He holds a Clinical Professor in the Northwestern Kellogg Business School, Public & Private Interface initiative. He teaches a new course,鈥淐EO Playbook for Health System Success鈥, and participates annually at the Harvard Business school in the case study “Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center: Spine Care, the center he started, and the TUCK school of Business at Dartmouth where serves as distinguished professor. In 2013 Dr Weinstein was named to the international Advisory Committee, Institute for Hospital Management, Shenzhen, China.
Dr. Weinstein is former Executive Director and a founding member, along with Mayo Clinic, Intermountain Healthcare, Cleveland Clinic and Geisinger Clinic, TDI, and Denver Health, of the national High Value Healthcare Collaborative (HVHC; 70 million patients, 70,000 physicians), a partnership of more than a dozen health systems, across all 50 states, that have taken on the
challenge of improving the quality of care while lowering costs. The Collaborative allowed for unprecedented data sharing, including electronic medical record data from each system, and the collection of patient-reported measures, which Dr Weinstein initiated in the in 1982 and congress has now adopted as part of meaningful use and the EPIC electronic health record company. The national sepsis efforts were supported by a $30 million CMMI (CMS) award led to marked decreases in mortality and significant cost savings nationally.
As a researcher and internationally renowned spine surgeon, Dr. Weinstein developed the classification system by which surgeons around the world treat cancers of the spine, as well as award-winning models for understanding pain mechanisms seen in millions of back pain patients. He is, Editor-in-Chief of SPINE, the number 1 ranked journal in the field, for the past 27 years. He has received more than $70 million in federal funding and has published more than 340 peer-reviewed articles. He is a leader in advancing informed choice to ensure patients receive evidence-based, safe, effective, efficient, and appropriate care. In 1999, he established the first-in-the-world Center for Shared Decision-Making at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, now used nationally and internationally. Patient choice is now playing a strong role in our nation鈥檚 path to improving care and lowering cost. He also founded the multidisciplinary Spine Center at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, an international model for patient-centered health care delivery and incorporates patient-reported outcomes in clinical practice, adding a new dimension to the process and clinical measurements traditionally used to judge the efficacy and value of care. In 2015, Dr. Weinstein co-developed , a virtual health care system that incorporates 24/7 connectivity to manage chronic diseases outside the traditional bricks and mortar hospital based systems. ImagineCare implemented in Scandinavia and Europe. Today, Dr Weinstein, in his role at Microsoft, is working globally with health systems/plans, around the world, to create a virtual health system. Several other efforts are underway with Microsoft to improve population health across the quadruple aim, using technology as an enabler of good.
In the past few years, he鈥檚 helped lead the formation of the funded initially by an $80 million grant from the Department of Defense and more than $300 million in private sector funding. ARMI uses 3D technology to print human organs, a development that could transform the world of organ transplantation and the lives of millions affected by diseases such as kidney disease and diabetes. He is a member of the Board of Directors of ARMI/BioFab.
Dr. Weinstein held the distinguished Peggy Y. Thomson Chair in the Evaluative Clinical Sciences at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth before joining Microsoft. He is a member of the and serves on the organization鈥檚 Board for Population Health and Public Health Practice. He served as Chair of the NAM Committee on Community Based Solutions to Promote Health Equity in the U.S, which published the report, 鈥“, and serves on several Boards of Trustees including the internationally renowned Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience, the Intermountain Health System, and the RESEARCH Advisory Board for the Kaiser Health system.
Dr. Weinstein has been an appointee to the Special Medical Advisory Group of the VA, which provides advice to the Secretary of Veterans Affairs and the Under Secretary for Health on
matters relating to the care and treatment of veterans. He is frequently consulted by members of Congress and the Administration, as well as government leaders on health policy and health reform.
In 2015, Dr. Weinstein was awarded the Ellis Island Medal of Honor by the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations. He is the 2017 recipient of the American Hospital Association鈥檚 Justin Ford Kimball Innovator鈥檚 Award. He has been named one of 鈥淭he 100 Most Influential People in Healthcare鈥 by Modern Healthcare magazine and top 50 鈥淧hysician Leaders to Know鈥 by Becker鈥檚 Hospital Review.
Dr. Weinstein stepped down from the position of CEO and President in June of 2017, to focus more closely on global health care issues, particularly around innovations in health system design and care delivery. He was delighted to join Microsoft. Under Satya Nadella鈥檚 leadership he sees Microsoft and its Trust in the market as critical to supporting health care for generations to come. His most recent book, , was published in February 2016 serves as a roadmap for many of the changes needed in Health Care. It has received excellent reviews and serves as a blueprint for much needed change in health care delivery and accountability.

Hal Yee Jr, Chief Deputy Director & Chief Medical Officer for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services. In this role Dr. Yee helps lead the nation鈥檚 2nd largest municipal health system, including 4 academic medical centers, a large ambulatory care network, affiliations with USC, UCLA, and 海角社区 Schools of Medicine, ~25,000 employees and contractors, and a budget of ~$6B. He serves on the Board of the California Association of Public Hospitals and Health Systems (CAPH), as well as on the advisory boards of the UCLA and USC Clinical and Translational Science Institutes (CTSIs). Previously, he was Rice Memorial Distinguished Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco; founding director of the UCSF-SFGH Center for Innovation in Access and Quality; and Chief Medical Officer and Chief of Gastroenterology at San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center. Dr. Yee graduated from Punahou School and Brown University, received his MD and PhD from UCLA, and completed internal medicine residency, gastroenterology and post-doctoral research fellowships at UCSF. He has had >25 years of extramural grant funding and authored over 90 publications. He made fundamental discoveries in our understanding of the molecular signals that control cellular contraction and motility, and the pathogenesis of hepatic and intestinal fibrosis. Since 2005 his research has evolved to focus on development and implementation of disruptive interventions to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of specialty health care delivery. Most notably he conceived of and served as the architect for the implementation and evaluation of award-winning electronic specialty care referral and consultation management systems in both San Francisco and Los Angeles鈥檚 health care safety nets. This system has respectively transformed access to, and the quality of, specialty care, and has spread across the US and Canada, as well as spawned an industry. More recently, he conceived of and helped lead implementation of the Expected Practice, a novel approach to successfully standardizing clinical practice. He was named one of Modern Healthcare’s Top 25 Innovators in 2020.
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