Board of Regents Profiles

Dr. Cynthia Morton is the current Chair of the NLM Board of Regents. She is employed as the Director of the Cytogenetic Division at the Brigham and Woman's Hospital in Boston and holds academic appointments at the Harvard Medical school. She is also the lead investigator in the Developmental Genome Anatomy Project, a study that analyzes blood samples from individuals with rare deformities caused by genetic abnormalities.

Dr. Morton's research includes studying uterine fibroids and rare diseases caused by chromosomal deformities, and the genetics of hearing loss. She is currently mapping the genes that make some women susceptible to uterine fibroids.

Dr. Morton received her Ph.D. in 1982 from the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond.

Most recently she was named editor of the American Journal of Human Genetics, the first female editor in the journal's 55-year history.

Dr. Jordan J. Cohen is the President Emeritus of the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC). He was President of the organization for 12 years from 1994-2006

Dr. Cohen's almost 40-year career in academic medicine has also included positions as Dean of the Medical School and Professor of Medicine at the State University, and Professor and Associate Chairman of Medicine at the University of Chicago-Pritzker School of Medicine. He has also held medical faculty positions at Harvard, Brown, and Tufts Universities.

He is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Medical School and his chief areas of research were acid-based metabolism and renal physiology. He is the author of more than 100 articles and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine.

John E. Connolly, MD, is Professor of Surgery at the University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine. Specializing in cardiovascular surgery, Dr. Connolly has a long history at UC Irvine, joining the medical school in 1965 as the founding chairman of the Department of Surgery. His patients and former residents endowed the John E. Connolly Chair of Surgery there in 1999.

The author of hundreds of medical papers, Dr. Connolly is also the recipient of several awards including honorary fellowships at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, Scotland, and honorary membership in the Japanese Surgical Society.

He received his medical degree from Harvard University in 1948.

Dr. Carol Friedman is the Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University in New York.

Her research has focused on both basic and applied research in the area of natural language processing, with a focus on the medical domain and more recently the biomolecular field. Among other applications, her findings have led to the development of MedLEE, an encoding system for the clinical field that is in daily use at New York Presbyterian Hospital.

Dr. Friedman is a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, and also serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics and the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

She received her Ph.D. from New York University in 1989.

Dr. C. Martin Harris is currently the Chief Information Officer and Chairman of the Information Technology Division of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation.

Dr. Harris' career has focused on information technology where he has also held the position of Associate Vice-President, Chief Information Officer, University of Pennsylvania Health System. Dr. Harris also serves as the Chairman of the National Health Information Infrastructure (NHII) Task Force of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), the largest information and management systems society in the world.

Dr. Harris received his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and his Masters in Business Administration from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

O. Wayne Isom, M.D., is the Kramer Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery and the Chairman of the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery at New York Presbyterian-Weill Cornell Medical Center. During a 30-year career, Dr. Isom has been a major figure in heart surgery. His team performs over 1,500 operations each year, and Dr. Isom has authored over 100 journal articles and 20 book chapters focusing on cardiac and thoracic surgery.

Dr. Isom is currently investigating the use of gene therapy in cardiac patients too weak to endure standard bypass surgery, where the inserted gene would stimulate the heart to grow new blood vessels. He received his medical degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School and went on to finish a medical internship and general surgical residency at Parkland Hospital in Dallas.

Bruce R. James is President and CEO of Nevada New-Tech, Inc., a company he formed to invest in technology-based enterprises. His distinguished career in the print and information industry began when he was 11. He bought his first printing press that year and operated it out of his family’s home.

Mr. James is founder and CEO of Barclay Law Publishers in San Francisco. Most recently, he was appointed Public Printer of the United States by President George W. Bush. He held that post, as the 24th Director of the US Government Printing Office, for five years and earned high praise for restoring GPO’s financial stability, streamlining its management structure and transforming it from an old fashioned print shop into a digital information organization.

Mr. James received his B.S. degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Louis F. Rossiter, PhD, a health economist, is Director of Research for the Center for Excellence in Aging and Geriatric Health and Director of the Schroeder Center for Healthcare Policy at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia.

Dr. Rossiter has published more than 50 articles and edited some 14 books. Most recently, he was the principal investigator in a study examining the emerging market of pharmacogenomics and healthcare competition. Pharmacogenomics is the study of how inherited variations in genes dictate a person’s reaction to a drug.

Dr. Rossiter received his PhD in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Ms. Eileen Stanley currently serves as a Senior Information Scientist at EcoLab, Inc., in Eagan, Minnesota. She is the former Director of the Library and AV/Conference Technologies at the Allina Health System in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and has had a distinguished career in library and information services where she has been the information architect for WellMed, Inc., in Portland, Oregon, and the Director of Library Services at the Earl K. Long Medical Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She is also a Distinguished Member of the Academy of Health Information Professionals, Medical Library Association.

Ms. Stanley received her master's degree in library and information science from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Virginia (Ginny) Tanji is the Director of the Health Services Library, John A. Burns School of Medicine in Hawaii, the only medical school in that state. Since 2002, Ms. Tanji has been involved in the planning and establishment of the new library at the medical school.

She serves on the boards and committees of a number of health sciences organizations, including the editorial board of the online journal, Dermanities, the Advisory Committee of the Hawaii Cancer and Complementary Medicine Lecture Series, and the Regional Advisory Committee of the Pacific Southwest Region, National Network of Libraries of Medicine.

Ms. Tanji received her master's degree in library science from the Graduate School of Library Sciences, University of Illinois.