Neil Sarkar

Neil Sarkar is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Rhode Island Quality Institute, which is the Regional Health Information Organization for the State of Rhode Island. He was the Founding Director of the Brown Center for Biomedical Informatics. The underlying hypothesis in Dr. Sarkarís research is that the integration of unlinked data leads to new information that can be used to inform knowledge about underpinning phenomena in biology and health. His current research includes harnessing data for supporting comparative genomic and phenomic studies of complex disease, including the development of models to predict trajectories of complex conditions, such as pregnancy and its complications. Dr. Sarkarís 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 is 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 120 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).

Dr. Sarkar is among the leaders in formally developing approaches to link biodiversity knowledge with biomedicine. His early work was essential for the formal description of the field of biodiversity informatics, and has since been core in defining translational bioinformatics. Dr. Sarkarís more than 65 publications include seminal contributions to phylogenetic classification, ontology development and use, information retrieval, as well as taxonomic name recognition (TNR; techniques for identifying organism names in text). A recurrent theme in his diverse research portfolio is the development of approaches for facilitating knowledge discovery from existing repositories of biomedical and biodiversity data.