The CDC Leaders

“If you want to travel fast, travel alone. If you want to travel far, travel together.”

—African proverb

Leslie Lenert, MD, MS

Director of the National Center for Public Health Informatics

Dr. Leslie Lenert is Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention′s National Center for Public Health Informatics. Prior to this appointment, he served as Director for the Health Services Research and Development section of the Veterans Medical Research Foundation, Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, Staff Physician at the VA San Diego Healthcare System and Associate Director of Medical Informatics at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIT 2). A graduate of the University of California, Riverside and the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine, he completed postgraduate training in Internal Medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School and a Fellowship in Clinical Pharmacology at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Dr. Lenert is a member of the editorial boards of Medical Decision Making, the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association and Journal of Biomedical Informatics. He is also a member of the Agency for Health Research and Policy′s Healthcare Technology and Decision Sciences study section. In 2002, he was appointed to the American College of Medical Informatics, in recognition of his work in the field of Informatics.

Dr. Lenert has research interests in the approach for measurement of patient preferences and assisting patients, clinicians and policy makers with difficult decisions. From a technical (informatics) perspective, Dr. Lenert pioneered use of computer interviewing techniques for preference surveys, the development of surveys with integrated multimedia materials and the development of web-based delivery mechanisms for surveys. Dr. Lenert also has extensive experience developing “toolkit” type software designed to help other investigators create their preference surveys and decision support programs.

An additional area of research interest for Dr. Lenert is the Wireless Internet Information System for Medical Response in Disasters (WIISARD) project. WIISARD is an advanced wireless location-aware electronic records system designed to facilitate the care of victims at the site of disasters or terrorist attacks.