biomedical Informatics Vice-Chair, Julio Facelli, PhD, was elected to be a fellow in the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI). "The College originated in 1984 when five pioneers in informatics decided to establish an honorific society to recognize expertise in biomedical Informatics. Today, there are nearly 300 Fellows, with 10-20 new Fellows elected each year when Voting Fellows of the College judge nominees during a formal election process."
Dr. Facelli has been a faculty member in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Utah since 2002. From 2007 to the present, he has been the Vice Chair and has provided outstanding leadership and service. Dr. Facelli’s contributes in a unique way to the department and to the entire field due to his extensive expertise in high performance computing and its application to biomedical data processing, storage, and analysis. In addition to his support of high performance computing infrastructure for the University Health Sciences Center, his novel methodologies for processing data stored in a HIPAA-compliant environment have enabled efficient supercomputing on biomedical data. Dr. Facelli brings his background in Physics and Chemistry to the field of informatics in a way that both broadens and focuses our vision— his work enables application of principles and algorithms developed in other fields to the peculiar challenges in biomedical data analysis, and his experience in fields much more mature than ours is helping direct us towards a grander vision.
Dr. Facelli is an accomplished and personal mentor for junior faculty as well as informatics students. He has placed particular emphasis on bringing to our field students with computational backgrounds who hunger to apply the techniques they have studied to problems of societal import. He has also established fruitful pipelines for training students of under-represented minorities in informatics. He focuses on the individual with a vision of how to improve and enrich our field.
