Coleen Burgess

Colleen Burgess is the managing partner for MathEcology, LLC, based in the Phoenix area.  Her background is in applied mathematics, numerical analysis and population ecology; she specializes in epidemiological modeling with particular emphasis on modeling transmissible diseases in structured populations.  Ms. Burgess and MathEcology have developed mathematical, ecological and epidemiological solutions for academic institutions, international organizations, and government agencies.

Kathleen Carley

Kathleen M. Carley received her Ph.D. from Harvard in Mathematical Sociology and is currently a full professor in the Institute for Software Research International in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.  She is also the director of the center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS).  In 2001 she received a life time achievement award for her work in computational modeling.  She is a founding editor of the journal Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, the founding president of the North American Association for Computational Social and Organizational Science, and has served on multiple national academy panels on simulation and modeling.

Kathleen M. Carley's research combines cognitive science, social networks and computer science to address complex social and organizational problems. Her specific research areas are computational social and organization theory, group, organizational and social adaptation and evolution, social and dynamic network analysis, computational text analysis, and the impact of telecommunication technologies and policy on communication, information diffusion, disease contagion and response within and among groups particularly in disaster or crisis situations.  Her models meld multi-agent technology with network dynamics and empirical data. Three of the large-scale multi-agent network models she and the CASOS group have developed in the counter-terrorism area are: BioWar a city, scale model of weaponized biological attacks and response; DyNet a model of the change in covert networks, naturally and in response to attacks, under varying levels of uncertainty; and VISTA a model for informing officials (e.g., military and police) of possible hostile and non hostile events (e.g., riots and suicide bombings) in urban settings as changes occur within and among red, blue, and green forces. One of her tools, ORA, produces intelligence reports identifying vulnerabilities in groups and organizations. She has co-edited several books in the computational organizations and dynamic network area and written over 100 papers in the area.

Hsinchun Chen, Ph.D.

Dr. Hsinchun Chen is McClelland Professor of Management Information Systems at the University of Arizona and Andersen Consulting Professor of the Year (1999). He received the B.S. degree from the National Chiao-Tung University in Taiwan, the MBA degree from SUNY Buffalo, and the Ph.D. degree in Information Systems from the New York University. He is author/editor of 10 books and more than 130 SCI journal articles covering intelligence analysis, biomedical informatics, data/text/web mining, digital library, knowledge management, and Web computing. His recent books include: Medical Informatics: Knowledge Management and Data Mining in Biomedicine and Intelligence and Security Informatics for International Security: Information Sharing and Data Mining, both published by Springer. Dr. Chen was ranked #8 in publication productivity in Information Systems (CAIS 2005) and #1 in Digital Library research (IP&M 2005) in two recent bibliometric studies. He serves on ten editorial boards including: ACM Transactions on Information Systems, ACM Journal on Educational Resources in Computing, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Decision Support Systems, and International Journal on Digital Library. Dr. Chen is a Scientific Counselor/Advisor of the National Library of Medicine (USA), Academia Sinica (Taiwan), and National Library of China (China), and has served as an advisor for major NSF, DOJ, NLM, and other international research programs in digital library, digital government, medical informatics, and national security research. Dr. Chen is founding director of Artificial Intelligence Lab and Hoffman E-Commerce Lab. The UA Artificial Intelligence Lab, which houses 40+ researchers, has received more than $17M in research funding from NSF, NIH, NLM, DOJ, CIA, and other agencies over the past 15 years. The Hoffman E-Commerce Lab, which has been funded mostly by major IT industry partners, features one of the most advanced e-commerce hardware and software environments in the College of Management. Dr. Chen is conference co-chair of ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2004 and has served as the conference/program co-chair for the past eight International Conferences of Asian Digital Libraries (ICADL), the premiere digital library meeting in Asia that he helped develop. Dr. Chen is also (founding) conference co-chair of the IEEE International Conferences on Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI) 2003-2006. The ISI conference, which has been sponsored by NSF, CIA, DHS, and NIJ, has become the premiere meeting for international and homeland security IT research. Dr. Chen’s COPLINK system, which has been quoted as a national model for public safety information sharing and analysis,  has been adopted in more than 150 law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The COPLINK research had been featured in New York Times, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, among others. The COPLINK project was selected as a finalist by the prestigious International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP)/Motorola 2003 Weaver Seavey Award for Quality in Law Enforcement in 2003. COPLINK research has recently been expanded to border protection (BorderSafe), disease and bioagent surveillance (BioPortal), and terrorism informatics research (Dark Web), funded by NSF, CIA, and DHS. Dr. Chen has also received numerous awards in information technology and knowledge management education and research including: AT&T Foundation Award, SAP Award, the Andersen Consulting Professor of the Year Award, the University of Arizona Technology Innovation Award, and the National Chaio-Tung University Distinguished Alumnus Award. Dr. Chen is an IEEE Fellow.

Mary P. Derby, RN, MS, MPH

Mary Derby received a Master of Science degree in Community Health Nursing and Master of Public Health degree from Boston University.  She has 20 years of nursing experience in pediatric acute and ambulatory care, managed care, public health nursing and community collaboration.  Ms. Derby, presently a Research Specialist, is a PhD epidemiology student and a National Institute of Health, National Institute of Nursing Research predoctoral fellow in the Graduate Program, Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, University of Arizona.  Her present research involves evaluating the usefulness of poison control center call data as a means of complementing public health surveillance systems for foodborne disease outbreaks.  She has published in the areas of hospice care, teen pregnancy decision making and poison control center based syndromic surveillance for foodborne illnesses.

Dan Desmond

Dan Desmond is the President of The SIMI Group, a leader in Health Informatics Interoperability focusing on public health and outbreak response.  Desmond has over twenty-five years of experience in the information and informatics fields in both the public and private sectors and has participated in interoperability standards efforts inthe automotive claims, video distribution and law enforcement image domains prior to current efforts.  In addition to current work efforts for laboratory and patient interoperability and surveillance, Desmond gained response and surveillance experience dealing in finding missing children, gang tracking and disabled access enforcement in the early 1990s. Desmond graduated from the University of California, Davis, in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Melissa R. Finley, DVM, PhD, Dip ACVIM

Dr. Finley is a technical staff member of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Department in the International Security Center at Sandia National Laboratories.  She is an international biosecurity analyst working in counter-agroterrorism, risk analysis of agricultural disease agents, and animal disease surveillance.  She received her D.V.M. from Colorado State University, and continued her clinical training with an internship in equine medicine at Alamo Pintado Equine Medical Center, Los Olivos CA and a residency in large animal medicine at Cornell University.  She then joined the faculty of the Kansas State University College of Veterinary Medicine, as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Clinical Sciences, Section of Agricultural Practices.  After earning a Ph.D. in Pharmacology from Kansas State University, she worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA.  Dr. Finley attained Diplomat status in the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine in 1997.

Daniel Ford, Ph.D.

Daniel Ford is a Research Staff Member in the Healthcare Information Infrastructure group in the Department of Computer Science at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. He joined IBM Research in 1992 and has since been a researcher in a number of different areas including high availability tertiary storage systems, web search, life science applications and mostly recently the development of novel software tools for disease modeling and epidemiology. Dr. Ford has extensive publications and holds 19 US Patents. He received his Ph.D from the University of Waterloo, his M.Sc. from the University of British Columbia and his B.Sc. (Hons.) from Simon Fraser University, all in Computer Science. He resides in New York with his wife and three children.

Paul Hu

Paul J. Hu is an Associate Professor and David Eccles Faculty Fellow at the David Eccles School of Business, the University of Utah.  He received his Ph.D. in Management Information Systems from the University of Arizona in 1998.  Hu was on faculty at the University of South Florida prior to joining Utah in 2000.  His research interests include system evaluations, information systems and management in health care, organizational technology implementation, electronic commerce, digital government, human-computer interaction, knowledge management, and outsourcing management.  Some of the his current research projects include designing information system evaluations in health care, cross-agency collaborations in e-government, online customer lifetime, within-session visiting behaviors and conversions, online customer trust, data mining for marketing, and IT investments and firm profitability.  Hu has published papers in Journal of Management Information Systems, Decision Sciences, Communications of the ACM, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, IEEE Intelligent Systems, IEEE Software, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Decision Support Systems, Social Science Computer Review, European Journal of Information Systems, Information and Management, Journal of Electronic Commerce Research, Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare, and Topics in Health Information Management.  He received a Best Paper Award at the 33rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.  Hu has received research funding from the National Science Foundation, the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, the University of Utah, and Center for International Business Education and Research.

James H. Kaufman

Dr. James H. Kaufman is a Research Manager in the Department of Computer Science at the IBM Almaden Research Center. He is currently a leader of a project focused on creating the technologies for an Interoperable Healthcare Information Infrastructure. This technology is the basis for IBM's winning proposal to demonstrate a prototype U.S. National Health Information Network. Dr. Kaufman is a fellow of the American Physical Society. He received his B.A. in Physics from Cornell University and his PhD in Physics from U.C.S.B.

During his scientific career at IBM Research Dr. Kaufman has made contributions to several fields ranging from grid computing, distributed computing, simulation science,  magnetic device technology, superconductivity, and experimental studies of the Moon Illusion. His current research interests include Interoperable Health Information Infrastructure, Electronic Health Records, and Spatiotemporal Epidemiological Modeling.

Dr. Chwan-Chuen King, Dr.PH.

Greg Kinne

Greg Kinne holds the position of Knowledge Management Director at AT&T with responsibilities for development and oversight of projects in the knowledge management arena.  Greg works closely with the International Knowledge Management Institute ™ in the areas of KM and the emerging International Knowledge Maturity Model (IKMM). Some of his current emphasis in knowledge management includes; syndromic surveillance, intelligent federated search techniques,  enterprise content  management, workflow, and business process reengineering.  Greg Kinne has over 30 years of information technology experience. Greg has an extensive background in software design and development and has implemented his solutions in hundreds of organizations around the world.  In the area of KM and bio-surveillance, Greg has had a leading role in AT&T's R&D effort to develop a nationally scaleable biosurveillance detection and infrastructure architecture.  He has promoted this effort in numerous government agencies as well as presentations on Capitol Hill.  Prior to coming to AT&T, Greg Kinne was the founder and owner of Cherry Creek Technologies based in Denver Colorado. Cherry Creek Technologies performed information technology consulting and programming projects and provided Internet services specializing in business-to-business e-Commerce, web page development, and application hosting.

Kenneth Komatsu, MPH

Kenneth Komatsu, MPH, is the Section Chief, Electronic Surveillance Program, Arizona Department of Health Services.  He has been leading epidemiology and surveillance preparedness activities for Arizona since 2003.  Mr. Komatsu also serves as the project manager of the Medical electronic Disease Surveillance and Intelligence System (MEDSIS) including development of electronic laboratory reporting and syndromic surveillance.  Prior to this position he spent 13 years heading the Infectious Disease Epidemiology Section in the Office of Infectious Disease Services and participated in numerous outbreak investigations as well as writing administrative code on communicable diseases.  Mr. Komatsu also worked as an epidemiologist in Acute Communicable Disease Control for Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, a hospital epidemiologist/QA Coordinator and as a food research microbiologist for Armour-Dial, Inc.  He received his Master of Public Health from UCLA and Bachelor of Science in Microbiology at the University of Arizona.

Eileen Koski

Eileen Koski holds the position of Director, Informatics Research at Quest Diagnostics Incorporated.  Her focus for the past few years has been the development of anomaly detection processes in conjunction with public health surveillance, beginning with a pioneering project in 1999, in collaboration with colleagues at the CDC, using St. Louis Encephalitis testing as a marker for the emergence of West Nile Encephalitis in NYC.  Ms. Koski's other area of expertise is in the graphical display of medical information, particularly data visualization and the application of innovative graphical design to medical reports.  Prior to joining Quest Diagnostics, Ms. Koski worked at Columbia University for many years where her work included serving as director of operations on a large, multi-center, NIH-sponsored, randomized clinical trial, as well as the design and implementation of medical databases for numerous clinical and research applications.  Ms. Koski's publications include co-authorship of a review article in JAMIA on syndromic surveillance.  She holds a bachelor's degree in Biology, a master's and an M.Phil. degree in Sociomedical Sciences, all from Columbia University.

James Kvach

Dr. James Kvach assumed his position as Chief Scientist (Senior Level-3) at the Defense Intelligence Agency's (DIA) Armed Forces Medical Intelligence Center (AFMIC) in April 1992.  AFMIC produces medical intelligence assessments and forecasts on foreign civilian and military health care systems, infectious disease occurrence, environmental health risks, and life science technologies.  Dr. Kvach provides scientific and technical advice to AFMIC's Director; is responsible for the quality assurance of the Center's production that serves operational forces, national policymakers, and DoD's acquisition community; and directs and executes the Center's foreign medical intelligence program and its external research and development program.

Dr. Kvach was born in Lorain, Ohio.  He graduated from Ohio State University with a Bachelor of Science degree in microbiology in 1968 and earned a Master of Science degree in microbiology from Miami University in 1973.  He received a Ph.D. degree in microbiology from Miami University in 1977, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University the following year. Before coming to DIA in 1985, Dr. Kvach spent 8 years in academia as a faculty member at the Johns Hopkins University's School of Hygiene and Public Health, and George Washington University's School of Medicine and Health Sciences.  In addition to teaching and laboratory research on the physiology of the causative agent of human leprosy, clinical research was performed on leprosy in collaboration with scientists in India, Mexico, Peru, and the Philippines.  Prior to his assignment at AFMIC, Dr. Kvach headed the Life Sciences Branch (1988-1992) at DIA's headquarters in Washington, D.C., and served as a senior scientific and technical analyst (1985-198

Bill Lober, MD

William B. Lober MD MS is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington (UW) in the Schools of Nursing, Medicine, and Public Health & Community Medicine.  Dr Lober directs the UW Clinical Informatics Research Group, which focuses on the development, integration, and evaluation of information systems to support individual and population health. His academic interests include information system-based surveillance; web-based information systems; support of population-based research in public health and biomedical research; computer supported collaborative work; and privacy and security.  Dr Lober is a board member of the International Society for Disease Surveillance, is a chief editor of Advances in Disease Surveillance, and was the organizing chair of the 2005 Syndromic Surveillance Conference.  He graduated from the UCSF/UC Berkeley Joint Medical Program, trained in Emergency Medicine at University of Arizona, is EM board certified, and completed a National Library of Medicine fellowship in Medical Informatics. In addition to his clinical training, he has a BSEE in Electrical Engineering from Tufts University and 10 years of industry experience in hardware and software engineering.

Cecil Lynch

Dr. Cecil Lynch is a medical informaticist and is focused on public health surveillance and the intersection of  public health and clinical care.  Dr. Lynch is an obstetrician gynecologist by training, and holds a  degree from  UCLA medical school, where he also completed his residency training. Dr. Lynch also holds a MS degree in medical  informatics, from the University of California at Davis. He is an Assistant Professor at UC Davis in Medical Informatics and has served in several leadership positions including Immediate past Chair of the Informatics Graduate Group and the Chief of the Office of Informatics and Surveillance for the California Department of Health Services Division of Communicable Diseases. Dr. Lynch is a co-chair for the HL7 Vocabulary Technical Committee and serves on the National Cancer Institute's caBIG project as a Vocabulary and Architecture consultant. He has provided several  informatics training sessions to the CDC National Center for Public Health Informatics as  they build their own informatics expertise.

Mark Thurmond

Dr. Thurmond is currently professor of epidemiology in the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis.  He is Co-Director of the Center for Animal Disease Modeling and head of the FMD Lab.  He first became involved with livestock as a young boy growing up in Northern California where he raised beef cattle.  He has 34 years of experience in veterinary medicine, including clinical practice in dairy cattle, international programs in tropical veterinary medicine and education, and teaching and research in infectious diseases of livestock.  His teaching includes epidemiologic methodology, infectious disease modeling, surveillance, foreign animal diseases, and infectious diseases of cattle.  Past research includes work on the epidemiology of bovine abortion, bovine leukemia virus, bovine virus diarrhea virus, neosporosis, and vesicular stomatitis.  Since 1997, his research has focused on global epidemiology and modeling of foot-and-mouth disease.  These efforts have contributed to an understanding of the conceptual foundations for FMD surveillance and for the prospects of FMD transmission within California, rates of intra-herd transmission of FMD, and regional and global risks of FMD.

Dr. Daniel Zeng

Dr. Daniel Zeng received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in industrial administration from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, and the B.S. degree in economics and operations research from the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China.  Currently, he is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Intelligent Systems and Decisions Laboratory in the Department of Management Information Systems at the University of Arizona. His research interests include security informatics, infectious disease informatics, spatio-temporal data analysis, software agents and their applications, computational support for auctions and negotiations, and recommender systems. He has co-edited three books and published about 60 peer-reviewed articles in Management Information Systems and Computer Science journals, edited books, and conference proceedings. He received two best paper awards and two teaching awards in the past six years. He also serves on editorial boards of five Information Technology-related journals and is currently editing several special topic issues for major IEEE publications. He is active in MIS and IEEE professional organizations and conference activities and is Vice President for Technical Activities for the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society.  He is also Vice President for Academic Activities, Chinese Association for Science and Technology (CAST-USA), a national professional organization.

Xiaohui Zhang, Ph.D.

Xiaohui Zhang, Ph.d. is a Senior Scientist, and Director of Asian Development at Scientific Technologies Corp.  Now he also serves as Chief Technologist for Consultancy Study of Hong Kong Communicable Disease Information System.  Prior to he came to STC, Dr. Zhang was the Chief Scientist of Intersect Technologies Corp. where he developed new algorithms to improve the enterprise network management. He has over 20 years experience in modeling and simulation of complex systems.  He has over 30 publications on decision-making technique under uncertainty, optimization, artificial intelligence, modeling and simulation of complex system, distributed simulation with GIS applications.