Neil Sarkar, PhD, MLIS

Neil Sarkar is an Associate Professor of Medical Science and Associate Professor of Health Services, Policy and Practice at Brown University. He was the Founding Director of the Brown Center for Biomedical Informatics. The underlying hypothesis in Dr. Sarkar's research is that integrating unlinked data yields new information that can inform knowledge of underlying phenomena in biology and health. His broad research portfolio includes harnessing data to support the identification of knowledge pertaining to drug- and food-based therapeutics. He also focuses on developing approaches to support population-level decision support tools, including engagement with heterogeneous data across health information exchanges. Dr. Sarkar's work has been funded by sources such as the National Science Foundation, the Ellison Medical Foundation, the Medical Library Association, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the US Department of Veterans Affairs, and the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Sarkar is an elected Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, and has been a member of the Board of Directors and Treasurer of the American Medical Informatics Association. In addition to having served on the editorial boards for the leading journals in biomedical informatics (including the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, the Journal of Biomedical Informatics, and Methods of Information in Medicine [for which he was an Associate Editor]), he is is the Founding Editor-and-Chief of JAMIA Open, a Gold Open Access journal launched in 2017. He has been an author on over 160 peer-reviewed articles, which span topics from comparative genomics using phylogenetic approaches to population-level trend detection and predictive modeling in clinical and public health contexts, as well as the editor of a major text used in biomedical informatics education ( Methods in Biomedical Informatics: A Pragmatic Approach).