John H. Holmes, PhD, is Professor of Medical Informatics in Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. He is the Associate Director of the Penn Institute for Biomedical Informatics and is Past-Chair of the Graduate Group in Epidemiology and Biostatistics. He has mentored or co-mentored 18 pre- and post-doctoral students in informatics or epidemiology, and has developed curricula for graduate training in epidemiology and biomedical informatics. Dr. Holmes has been recognized nationally and internationally for his work on developing and applying new approaches to mining epidemiologic surveillance data, as well as his efforts at furthering educational initiatives in clinical research.
Dr. Holmes’ research interests are focused on the intersection of medical informatics and clinical research, specifically evolutionary computation and machine learning approaches to knowledge discovery in clinical databases, deep electronic phenotyping, interoperable information systems infrastructures for epidemiologic surveillance, and their application to a broad array of clinical domains, including cardiology and pulmonary medicine. He has collaborated as the informatics lead on an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality-funded project at Harvard Medical School to establish a scalable distributed research network. He has also served as the co-lead of the Governance Core for the SPAN project, a scalable distributed research network, and he participates in the FDA Sentinel Initiative. Dr. Holmes recently served as the evaluator for the PCORNet Obesity Initiative studies, where he was responsible for developing and implementing the evaluation plan and metrics for the initiative.
Dr. Holmes is a principal or co-investigator on projects funded by the National Cancer Institute, the National Library of Medicine, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and he was the Penn Principal Investigator of the NIH-funded Penn Center of Excellence in Prostate Cancer Disparities. Dr. Holmes is engaged with the Botswana-UPenn Partnership, assisting in building informatics education and clinical research capacity in Botswana. Dr. Holmes is an elected Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) and the American College of Epidemiology (ACE), and an elected Member of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI).