Public Biography
Dr. Elkin serves as the UB Distinguished Professor and Chair of the UB Department of Biomedical Informatics. Dr. Elkin has published over 200 peer reviewed publications and book chapters. He received his Bachelors of Science from Union College and his M.D. from New York Medical College. He did his NIH/NLM sponsored fellowship in Medical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Elkin has been working in Biomedical Informatics since 1981 and has been actively researching health big data science since 1987. Dr. Elkin is a Master of the American College of Physicians and a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine. He was awarded the Mayo Department of Medicine’s Laureate Award for 2005. Dr. Elkin is the index recipient of the Homer R. Warner award for outstanding contribution to the field of Medical Informatics. Dr. Elkin is an internationally renowned expert in knowledge representation, ontology, natural language processing and health IT standards. Dr. Elkin in 2018 received the Team Science Award from the National Center for Advancement of Translational Sciences and was elected an inaugural fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association for Clinical Informatics excellence and has been elected to the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics. He serves as co-chair of the NCATS iEC and of the NCATS Informatics Quality Metrics Committee. He publishes the Springer series Textbook on Ontology, Terminology and Terminological Systems.
Historic ACMI Biography
Dr. Elkin received his bachelorís degree in applied mathematics from Union College, his MD from New York Medical College, and was a National Library of Medicine (NLM) Research Fellow in medical informatics at the Laboratory of Computer Science at Mass. General Hospital. There he acquired a research interest in health data representation and controlled vocabularies. In 1996 he moved to Mayo Clinic and has risen through the ranks there to become Professor of Medicine. He is the primary author of the American National Standards Institute standard on Quality Indicators for Controlled Health Vocabularies, and has been an active contributor to HL7, the American Society for Testing and Materials E31 Bioinformatics standards group, the American Medical Informatics Associationís education committee, the G-7 Enable Project, and the International Standards Organization TC215 Health Data Advisory Group. He was principal investigator for a recently completed NLM R01 research grant to determine the ìutility of automated systems for large scale mapping of concepts to controlled terminologies, with the aim of establishing methods for more complete, accurate and uniform descriptions of encounters between clinicians and patients.î His election to the College recognizes these research and international standards development activities.
Affiliations
Fellows of AMIA (FAMIA)
FAMIA stands for “Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association” and it recognizes the contributions and professional accomplishments of AMIA members who apply informatics skills and knowledge to their practice – be that in a clinical setting, a public or population health capacity, or as a clinical researcher.
Year Inducted
2019
The American College of Medical Informatics
ACMI is a college of elected Fellows from the U.S. and abroad who have made significant and sustained contributions to the field of medical informatics. It is the central body for a community of scholars and practitioners who are committed to advancing the informatics field.
Year Elected
2006
Education Committee
Board Liaison
The Education Committee’s primary function is to advise, develop, support, and continuously evaluate a comprehensive approach to educational and practice-based training opportunities for members and the learning needs of AMIA's various audiences.
Learn more about this group