BIO: Vimla L Patel is a Senior Research Scientist and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies in Medicine and Public Health at the New York Academy of Medicine. She is also an adjunct Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University and the College of Health Solutions at Arizona State University (ASU). A graduate of McGill University in Montreal, Dr. Patel was a Professor of Medicine and Psychology and Director of McGill Cognitive Science Center. From 2007-2009, she served as the Professor and Chair of Biomedical Informatics in the Ira Fulton School of Engineering at ASU. Her early research related to cognitive mechanisms underlying expertise and medical decision-making. Her studies over the past two decades are on decision support technology and errors in complex clinical environments, addressing the role of cognition in biomedical informatics (human-computer interaction, cognitive design, distributed cognition, and team decision making) for a safer clinical workplace.
Dr. Patel is an elected fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (Canada), the American College of Medical Informatics, and the International Academy of Health Information Sciences. She is the editor of the Springer Book Series on Cognitive Informatics in Healthcare and Biomedicine. She is on the Journal of Intelligence-based Medicine editorial board and a past associate editor of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics, and assistant editor of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. She has over 300 scholarly publications spanning books and journals in biomedical informatics, education, clinical medicine, and cognitive science.