Meet the Experts Bios

Patricia Flatley Brennan, RN, PhD, Director of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) since 2016, spearheaded the development of a 10-year strategic plan that makes NLM a platform for biomedical discovery and data-powered health. Combining her background in engineering, information technology, and clinical nursing practice, Dr. Brennan positions the NLM and its visionary biomedical data and literature resources to serve science and society and guide advances in data science and data driven discovery.

Kathy Canese, MLIS, joined the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCNI) in the National Library of Medicine (NLM) in the early days of PubMed. She is now the program manager for PubMed, NCBI MeSH, and the NLM Catalog databases. Ms. Canese is also responsible for the submission and editing of citation data by publishers via the PubMed Data Management (PMDM) system. She earned her master’s degree in library and information science from the NY University at Albany.

Dina Demner Fushman, MD, PhD is a major contributor in the application of natural language processing and information management for enhancing clinical infrastructure and health care delivery at the National Library of Medicine. She developed an innovative method combining UMLS ontological knowledge with clinical knowledge from the literature. This approach, which was originally devised for clinical question answering, is being applied to automatic extraction of information needs from NIH Clinical Center records. She has been recognized as a leading biomedical NLP researcher as evidenced by her role since 2007 in organizing the BioNLP workshops of the Association for Computational Linguistics, which have attracted a growing number of mainstream computational linguists and computer scientists.

Anna Fine, PharmD, MS, Assistant Director for ClinicalTrials.gov at the National Library of Medicine (NLM), oversees communication about policies related to the program, including engagement with stakeholders on the ClinicalTrials.gov modernization. Prior to joining the NLM family, Anna worked at the Food and Drug Administration for more than a decade and was Director of the Health Professional Engagement program. After obtaining a Doctor of Pharmacy from Northeastern University, she completed a post graduate residency program in drug information at Stanford Hospital and Clinics in California and has previously served in honorably in the United States Air Force.

Valerie Florance, PhD, FACMI is an Associate Director of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and Director of NLM’s Extramural Programs Division at NIH. She is responsible for research, resource, training, career transition and small business grant programs in biomedical informatics and data science. Dr. Florance is a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and holds graduate degrees in library science, medical anthropology and biomedical information science.

Kin Wah Fung, MD, MS, MA, is a Staff Scientist at the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. He worked as a surgeon for 15 years before becoming a medical informatician. He has experience in implementing and managing clinical information systems in large-scale healthcare institutions and his current research interests include controlled medical terminologies and issues related to their use in the clinical environment. He received his medical training in Hong Kong and U.K. Dr. Fung earned his MS degree in Computer-based Information Systems from the University of Sunderland, U.K. and his MA degree in Medical Informatics from Columbia University, New York.

Kathryn Funk, MLIS, is the program manager for PubMed Central (PMC) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM). She overseas PMC policy and other special projects, including PMC’s role in supporting the public access policies of numerous funding agencies. Prior to NLM, Katie worked in academic publishing, most recently at the American Psychological Association. She received her master’s degree in library and information science from The Catholic University of America.

Rebecca Goodwin, JD is a policy analyst and open science specialist in the National Library of Medicine (NLM) Office of Strategic Initiatives (OSI) and Office of the Director. She coordinates technology transfer for NLM, provides guidance related to legal and intellectual property (IP) issues affecting NLM, and supports NLM policy development and legislative tracking. As executive secretary for the NIH Common Data Elements (CDE) Task Force, Ms. Goodwin plans, develops, implements, and coordinates activities in the areas of open science and the intersection of open science and data science across NLM, NIH, HHS, and beyond. She previously worked in NLM’s intramural research program managing special projects and as special assistant to the Director of the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications. She earned her JD from the University of Florida and completed a Presidential Management Fellowship at the National Cancer Institute.

Vojtech Huser, MD, PhD, conducts research as a staff scientist at the National Library of Medicine (NLM), one of 27 institutes and centers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). His research expertise and training are in clinical medicine and clinical informatics. Dr. Huser’s research interest include clinical informatics, knowledge representation, clinical research informatics, data repositories and healthcare data science, workflow technology, executable clinical guidelines, medical decision support systems and quality improvement in healthcare. He was a PhD Fulbright Scholar at the University of Utah.

Xiaofang Jiang, PhD, is a principal investigator in the National Library of Medicine (NLM) Intramural Research Program at National Institutes of Health. She leads a team of researchers to develop efficient computational methods to unravel biological insights from species of the human microbiome. Specifically, her team is interested in identifying the genomic basis of disease-associated phenotypes by mining multi-omics data.

Mehmet Kayaalp, MD, PhD, has been a student of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Medicine since 1990. He received his MD degree in 1989, MS in Computer Science in 1993, and PhD in Intelligent Systems in 2003. He also has completed his Biomedical Informatics training in 2003. He has been working at the National Institutes of Health as a staff scientist since 2003. He is the Principal Investigator of the National Library of Medicine (NLM)-Scrubber project and the main developer of NLM-Scrubber, a software application to protect patient privacy.

Zhiyong Lu, PhD, FACMI, has contributed significantly to the fields of biomedical information retrieval and natural language processing. His research has resulted in significant search improvements in PubMed, and several highly innovative and widely used systems including PubTator. Dr. Lu has (co-)authored over 180 articles with around 12,000 citations and mentored more than 35 trainees.

Paul Lynch is technical lead on the Lister Hill Center (LHC)-Forms project (https://lhcforms.nlm.nih.gov/) within the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications division of the National Library of Medicine. The LHC-Forms project develops tools, widgets, and web services for HL7 FHIR applications and datasets.

Robin Taylor, MLIS, joined the National Library of Medicine (NLM) as the lead for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Common Data Elements (CDE) Repository, hosted by NLM. She supports daily operations of the repository, provides user support, coordinates quality assurance, collaborates with NIH and external partners, and develops strategic goals and objectives. Previously, Ms. Taylor worked in libraries for seven years overseas, and as a Digital Library Specialist at the Library of Congress. She earned a masters degree in Library and Information Science from San Jose State University and a bachelors degree in English from Davidson College.