Prakash Nadkarni, MD, FACMI

Prakash Nadkarni is an Associate Professor at the Center for Medical Informatics, Yale University School of Medicine. Dr. Nadkarni received his undergraduate medical degree from Bombay University, India, and subsequently obtained a specialty degree in pharmacology, a diploma in computer management, and a diploma in radiation medicine from Bombay University. Dr. Nadkarni's research interests focused originally on parallel computation in biomedicine and later on representation approaches and algorithms concerned with chromosomal maps generated by a variety of experimental methodologies. He is now involved in creating applications that use databases and database-related technology to address a variety of biomedical problems. An active area of recent research is the development of a generic (entity-attribute-value, or EAV) Web-accessible database for management of clinical studies. TrialDB, the database package resulting from these efforts, is available to informatics investigators as open source; it continues to be enhanced to better meet the needs of investigators and study management personnel. Dr. Nadkarni also studies the application of EAV database design to represent highly heterogeneous scientific data, and the EAV/CR framework is being employed for a neuroscience database at Yale that is focused on the olfactory system. Both TrialDB and EAV/CR have been developed from a common basis óthe use of metadata stored in the database to automate various tasks related to the creation of robust Web-based applications, notably the automatic generation of user interfaces for browsing as well as editing data. An offshoot of the focus on clinical databases has been research in the processing of textual medical data, such as discharge summaries and surgical notes. Prior to joining Yale University, Dr. Nadkarni was lecturer in pharmacology at GS Medical College and King Edward VII Memorial Hospital, Bombay, India; a consultant with Tata Unisys (an affiliate of Unisys Corp.) for computer applications in medicine, and a contributing editor to Science Today (now renamed 2001), India's leading science magazine. He is a member of the editorial boards of JAMIA, the Pharmacogenomics Journal (published by the Nature group), and the Journal of Postgraduate Medicine, Bombay.