Joel Saltz
Department of Biomedical Informatics
Stony Brook University
Stony Brook, NY 11794
Interests
Biography
Joel Saltz served at Emory since 2008 as founding Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics, and Professor in the School of Medicine, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, the College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, and the School of Public Health, Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics. He led the Biomedical Informatics PhD Track in Emory’s Computer Science and Informatics Program and ran “Clinical and Translational Informatics Rounds” – monthly lectures and discussions in the area of clinical and translational informatics. At Emory, he helped launch Biomedical Informatics-specific Masters and Doctoral programs, in addition to a myriad of other department specific courses on informatics.
Prior to his appointment at Emory, he served as Professor and Founding Chair of the new Department of Biomedical Informatics at The Ohio State University College of Medicine from 2001 to 2008. At Ohio State, he served as Associate Vice President for Health Sciences for Informatics, and he played important leadership roles in the Cancer Center, Heart Institute and Department of Pathology.
Joel Saltz received his Bachelors and Masters of Science degrees in Mathematics at the University of Michigan and then entered the MD/PhD program at Duke University, with his PhD studies performed in the Department of Computer Sciences. He began his academic career in Computer Science at Yale, the Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering at NASA Langley and the University of Maryland College Park. He completed his residency in Clinical Pathology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and served as Professor with a dual appointment at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins, serving in the University of Maryland Department of Computer Science and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, and the Johns Hopkins Department of Pathology. Dr. Saltz is a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics.
Research
Joel Saltz is a leader in research on advanced information technologies for large scale data analytics, biomedical and scientific research. He has developed innovative clinical informatics systems including the first published whole slide virtual microscope system and leading edge clinical data warehouse frameworks. He has spearheaded several multi-disciplinary efforts creating cutting-edge tools and middleware components for the management, analysis, and integration of heterogeneous biomedical data. Dr. Saltz broke new ground with middleware systems that target distributed and high-end systems including the filter-stream based DataCutter system, the map-reduce style Active Data Repository and the inspector-executor runtime compiler framework.
Joel Saltz currently leads two major application thrusts. The first is to develop large scale data management and analysis systems integrating “omics”, Pathology, Radiology and clinical information. His approach consists of closely coordinated efforts in image analysis, machine learning, database design and high end computing. These efforts leverage and extend tools and methods he developed through years of funded projects supported by a wide range of institutes and agencies including NCI, NLM, NIBIB, NSF, DARPA, AFOSR, NASA, DOD and DOE to develop innovative techniques, methodologies, algorithms and software systems to support integrative data analyses, large scale digital microscopy, high-performance computing, data management, and data federation . He targets cloud, cluster, GPU and Leadership Scale platforms.
The second thrust is to develop data analytic methods that integrate and analyze information from multiple complementary clinical, financial and operational sources with the goal of optimizing quality and efficiency of health care systems and to support population health efforts. Stony Brook Biomedical Informatics will serve as a vehicle to integrate academics and innovation into the fabric of operations for Stony Brook Medicine to create a living laboratory. Our dual goal is to develop innovative algorithms, methods and software and to lead the way in improving healthcare.