Harvard’s Isaac Kohane, M.D., Ph.D., to Receive Collen Award at AMIA Symposium
This year, Isaac Kohane, M.D., Ph.D., a professor and chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School will join an illustrious list of informaticists who have won the Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence, presented by the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI).
The award is given each year at the AMIA Symposium in honor of Morris F. Collen, a pioneer in the field of medical informatics at Kaiser Permanente. It is presented to an individual whose personal commitment and dedication to medical informatics has made a lasting impression on the field. Past winners have included Patricia Flatley Brennan, R.N., Ph.D., director of the National Library of Medicine; and David Bates, M.D., chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine and Primary Care at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and the medical director of clinical and quality analysis for Partners Health Care System.
Kohane will receive the award during the Opening Session of the AMIA 2020 Virtual Annual Symposium, which takes place Nov. 14-18.
“The Morris F. Collen Award is only awarded to the most distinguished informaticians. ACMI is honored to recognize Dr. Kohane for his substantial accomplishments to the field of biomedical informatics,” said ACMI President, William M. Tierney, M.D., professor and chair of the Department of Population Health at the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin, in a statement. “Dr. Kohane has revolutionized many areas of biomedical informatics and has changed the way we practice patient care delivery. He is also an incredibly generous and gifted mentor offering guidance to more than 50 formal trainees, many of whom are ACMI Fellows.”
Kohane is widely recognized as the lead investigator of a $25 million National Center for Biomedical Computing (NCBC): Informatics for Integrating Biology to the Bedside (i2b2). i2b2 is an NIH-funded NCBC based at Partners HealthCare System in Boston. The key challenge that i2b2 is designed to address is that of creating a comprehensive software and methodological framework to enable clinical researchers to accelerate the translation of genomic and “traditional” clinical findings into novel diagnostics, prognostics, and therapeutics. i2b2 provides a technical solution to information exchange across institutions. It is now a standardized component of hundreds of analytic projects all over the world.
He has designed and led multiple internationally adopted efforts to “instrument” the healthcare enterprise for discovery and to enable innovative decision-making tools to be applied to the point of care. The new insights have inspired him and his collaborators to work on re-characterizing and reclassifying diseases such as autism, rheumatoid arthritis, and cancers. In many of these studies, the developmental trajectories of thousands of genes have been a powerful tool in unraveling complex diseases.
Kohane has been elected to fellowship in the American College of Medical Informatics, the Society of Pediatric Research, the American Society of Clinical Investigation and was elected a member of the Institute of Medicine. He has previously been honored by AMIA with the Donald A.B. Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics and the William W. Stead Award for Thought Leadership in Informatics.
