Suzanne Bakken, PhD, RN, FAAN, FACMI, FIAHSI, is the Alumni Professor of Nursing and Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University. Following her doctorate in Nursing at the University of California, San Francisco, she completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Medical Informatics at Stanford University. Her program of research has focused on the intersection of informatics and health equity for more than 30 years and has been funded by AHRQ, NCI, NIMH, NINR, and NLM. Dr. Bakken’s program of research has resulted in > 300 peer-reviewed papers. At Columbia Nursing, she leads the NINR-funded Precision in Symptom Self-Management (PriSSM) Center and Reducing Health Disparities Through Informatics (RHeaDI) Pre- and Post-doctoral Training Program. She also serves as co-lead of Columbia’s FHIR Lab. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing, American College of Medical Informatics, International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics, and a member of the National Academy of Medicine.

Dr. Bakken has received multiple awards for her research including the Pathfinder Award from the Friends of the National Institute of Nursing Research, the Nursing Informatics Award from the Friends of the National Library of Medicine, the Sigma Theta Tau International Nurse Researchers Hall of Fame, and the Virginia K. Saba Award from the American Medical Informatics Association. Most recently, she was the first nurse recipient of the Francois Gremy Award from the International Medical Informatics Association and in 2021, she received the Virginia Saba Nursing Informatics Award from Sigma Theta Tau International. Dr. Bakken currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association and as a member of the Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine.

William L. Holzemer, RN, PhD, FAAN
Distinguished Professor and Dean Emeritus, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Professor Emeritus, University of California San Francisco
Distinguished Honorary Professor, St. Luke’s University, Tokyo

Dr. Holzemer has a distinguished research career in nursing, receiving his first research award (R01) in 1978 to study clinical decision-making among nurse practitioners. Since then, he has had continuous NIH extramural funding as Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator from 1978-2009. He served for six years as a chartered member and Chair of a National Institutes of Health (NIH) study section. For the last 20 years, his research has focused on symptom management, adherence, stigma and quality of life for people living with the HIV infection.

He served as a member of Council for NINR, NIH (2013-2016). He is an internationally recognized expert in academic nursing and HIV/AIDS care providing global leadership to the World Health Organization, the International Council of Nurses, and many Universities around the world. He has served as consultant and external reviewer for governmental agencies such as the Finish Academy of Nursing, the Japan Academy of Nursing, African Nursing Honor Society, RAE 2001 Higher Education Funding Council (United Kingdom), the Medical Research Council for South Africa and others. He has demonstrated leadership with the National League for Nursing (NLN), American Academy of Nursing (AAN), Commission on the Graduates of Foreign Nursing Schools (CGFNS), American Nurses Association (ANA), and served as President of the American Nurses Foundation (ANF) (2002-2006). Under his leadership in 2000, the Council for the Advancement of Nursing Science was organized within the American Academy of Nursing to provide a national voice for translational research and health policy development related to nursing science.

Dr. Holzemer is a member of the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine), Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing, and a member of the Japan Academy of Nursing. He is a former Fulbright Scholar (Egypt), a Project HOPE Fellow (USA-Mexico Border), and is a Distinguished 4 Visiting Professor at St. Luke’s College of Nursing, Tokyo, Japan. Dr. Holzemer has lectured widely in the United States and many countries of the world. During 1998 and 1999 he served as an External Examiner for the Department of Nursing at the University of Botswana, Gaborone. He served as an elected member of the International Council of Nurses Board of Directors, 2005-2013.

Dr. Holzemer has provided national leadership through his participation in national commissions. In 1994, Dr. Holzemer served on the first national guideline panel for care of HIV, Evaluation and Treatment of Early HIV Infection (AHRQ). Dr. Holzemer has served on two Institute of Medicine committees. From 2001-2003 he served as a member of the committee that produced the report, Measuring What Matters: Allocation, Planning, and Quality Assessment for the Ryan White Care Act (2003). From 2004- 2007 he served as member and chair of the Care sub panel that evaluated the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) which resulted in the text, PEPFAR Implementation: Progress and Promise (2007). Currently he serves on the IOM study title, Science of Changing Behavioral Health Norms (2014- 2015). From 2000-2004 he coordinated a collaborative project with nurse faculty members from the Universities of Botswana, Lesotho, South Africa, and Swaziland on self-care and family care symptom management in the home for people living with HIV/AIDS. In spring 2003, he completed a randomized clinical trial titled “Outpatient Nurse Managed HIV Adherence Trial” (R01 NR04846). From 2002-2007 he co-directed the Nursing Research Center on HIV/AIDS Health Disparities (P20 NR08359), linking faculty from the University of Puerto Rico and UCSF Schools of Nursing in research. From 2005-2007 he led a multi-site international study investigating the efficacy of a symptom management manual for improving quality of life for people living with HIV/AIDS. From 2004-2009, he conducted a five-year study (R01 TW06395) supported by NIH’s Fogarty International Center examining the role of stigma and discrimination on quality of life for persons living with HIV/AIDS and on quality of work life for nurses caring for people living with HIV/AIDS in Lesotho, Malawi, South Africa, Swaziland, and Tanzania. In 1996, Dr. Holzemer founded the UCSF International Nursing Network for HIV/AIDS Research. This Network conducts and disseminates nursing research to help people “live well with HIV”. Dr. Holzemer retired from the University of California, San Francisco, in 2009, he then served as Dean, School of Nursing, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, form 2009- 2019 and is now a Distinguished Professor.

Dr. Casimir Kulikowski carries out research on biomedical informatics and artificial Intelligence as Board of Governors Professor of Computer Science at Rutgers – The State University of New Jersey. He chairs the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) History Working Group and the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) Committee of Historians. The main focus of his research and teaching is on pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, and biomedical and health informatics. With his first doctoral student and collaborator Sholom Weiss, he developed the first causal network model of disease, implemented as an expert system for glaucoma diagnosis and treatment (CASNET), the generalization of this system in the compiled rule-based framework EXPERT, the first medical expert system on a chip incorporated into a commercial clinical instrument (Helena Labs’ Clinical Densitometer), and helped develop knowledge representations for the collaborative AI/RHEUM Decision Support System, and the first hand-held expert system for decision support in infectious eye diseases deployed in Africa and sponsored by WHO.

Dr. Kulikowski has written about their contributions in papers in Peter Szolovits’ 1984 book Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, in Bruce Blum’s 1987 edited volume: History of Medical Informatics in the US and in numerous other books and articles for encyclopedias and co-authored two books with Weiss on A Practical Guide to Designing Expert Systems. Rowman & Allenheld, 1984, and Weiss SM Kulikowski CA Computer Systems that Learn: Techniques from Statistics, Neural Nets, Machine Learning, and Expert Systems, Morgan Kaufmann, 1991, as well as co-edited the IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics from 2001 to 2012.

Dr. Kate Miller is the Vice President for Research and Innovation at UT Arlington. Miller has more than two decades of leadership experience in higher education, most recently serving as the provost and vice president for academic affairs at the University of Wyoming and having spent time in Texas at both Texas A&M and UT El Paso.

Prior to her leadership at the University of Wyoming, Miller served as dean of the College of Geosciences at Texas A&M University, fostering major interdisciplinary research collaborations across the institution. Under her guidance, the college re-secured its long-term cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation to manage the science services for the International Ocean Discovery program, among other milestones.

 Throughout her career, Miller has served as principal investigator or co-principal investigator on projects totaling $16.8 million, including $8.9 million to support research infrastructure. Miller earned her doctorate and master’s degrees in geophysics from Stanford University and a bachelor’s degree in geological and geophysical sciences from Princeton University. Her research into active source seismology, continental evolution and shallow geophysics has resulted in nearly 70 refereed publications.

Ferdinand Velasco, M.D. As Texas Health’s chief health information officer, Dr. Ferdinand Velasco leads  the system’s functions responsible for clinical decision support, medical informatics, nursing informatics, research informatics, electronic health record reporting, clinical analytics, and quality measurement. Through his and his team’s leadership of the implementation of the electronic health record, Texas Health was awarded the Enterprise Davies Award for Excellence in 2013 and has achieved  HIMSS EMRAM Stage 7. In addition to his administrative responsibilities, Dr. Velasco is an Adjunct Associate Professor with the UT Southwestern Medical Center and a member of the Clinical Informatics Center at UT Southwestern.

Prior to joining Texas Health Resources in 2002, Dr. Velasco served as an assistant professor and physician champion for the implementation of computerized physician order entry (CPOE) at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University. He simultaneously practiced as a cardiothoracic surgeon at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.

A Fellow of the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS), Dr. Velasco served on the North America Board of HIMSS and chaired the society’s Quality, Cost, Safety Committee.  Modern Healthcare honored Dr. Velasco as an inaugural member of the Top 25 Clinical Informaticists in Healthcare. He received his medical degree from the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine.