Mark A Musen

MD, PhD, Stanford University, USA

“Journal of Biomedical Semantics provides a unique opportunity for scientific exploration at the intersection of semantic systems and biomedicine. The complexities of health, healthcare, and the life sciences often demand computational approaches that make knowledge about the domain and about problem-solving strategies explicit and declarative. Indeed, because computational solutions in biomedicine so often require detailed semantic modeling for their success, important advances in semantic systems seem to spring naturally from the pragmatics of work in this area.”

Mark A. Musen, M.D., Ph.D., is Director of the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Informatics Research, where he is Professor of Medicine and Computer Science. Dr. Musen is principal investigator of the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO), one of the National Centers for Biomedical Computing supported by the United States National Institutes of Health.

For more than two decades, he has led the Protégé project, and has used Protégé to develop semantic technologies to assist in diverse applications such as guideline-based care of patients who have chronic disease, public-health surveillance, and concept-based information retrieval.

Dr. Musen consults to industry in the area of semantic technology, and currently is assisting the World Health Organization in its revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) and of several other classification systems. He is a recipient of the Donald A. B. Lindberg Award from the American Medical Informatics Association for his pioneering work to create tools that enable developers to apply semantic technology in the construction of biomedical systems.