Joyce A. Mitchell,Ph.D., FACMI, FACMG

Research Interests

• Clinical Research Informatics
• Informatics Leadership and Governance
• Informatics of Personalized Health Care
• Translational Bioinformatics

Board Certification and Academic Information

Academic Office Locations

Academic Bio

Joyce A. Mitchell obtained her PhD in Population Genetics from the University of Wisconsin with postdoctoral training in clinical genetics and in medical informatics sciences. She is a Fellow of both the American College of Medical Informatics (FACMI) and the American College of Medical Genetics (FACMG). She is certified as a medical geneticist by the American Board of Medical Genetics and the American College of Medical Genetics.

In 2005, Dr. Mitchell was recruited by the University of Utah to serve as Department Chair for Biomedical Informatics. In 2007 she was appointed as Associate Vice President for Health Sciences IT, where she coordinates and directs the information technology resources for the academic mission. She is also the director of the Biomedical Informatics Core for the Center for Clinical and Translational Sciences (CCTS)

Prior experience includes 25 years on the faculty of the University of Missouri School of Medicine in two departments: Child Health (Section on Medical Genetics) and Health Management and Informatics (Division Leader of Health Informatics). Administratively, she has served as the Director of the Medical Informatics Group, the Associate Dean for Information Technology for the School of Medicine, and the Chief Information Officer for University of Missouri Health Care. She spent a sabbatical year at the National Library of Medicine (2001) and developed the Genetics Home Reference to bridge the genomics research results with consumer health interests in genetic diseases.

Dr. Mitchell was elected to serve as President of the American College of Medical Informatics from 2008-2010, and will serve as immediate past-president until 2012. She is currently serving a four-year term on the Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), and will serve on the Council of Councils for the National Institute of Health from 2012-2016. Dr. Mitchell serves as co-director of the NLM-sponsored course in Biomedical Informatics held annually at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

“It was serendipity that brought me into the field of Informatics. I had just finished my PhD at the University of Wisconsin. I was looking for a postdoctoral position at the University of Missouri because my husband had a job in Columbia, Missouri. I met Donald Lindberg who said I had a great background for the new field called Medical Information Sciences (now called Biomedical Informatics). He had postdoctoral fellowships funded by the National Library of Medicine. I had never heard of this field and did not know what it was all about. However, I figured that it might be interesting for two years. It obviously became my major career path. I love this field because of the complexity of the issues and importance of the work to society as a whole across so many dimensions.”