John H. Holmes, Ph.D.
- Instructor, PUBH 506 Methods for Public Health Practice
- Co-director for PH506
- Assistant Professor of Medical Informatics in Epidemiology, Hospital of University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Holmes has been with the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania since 1982, where he has held a variety of research staff positions. Prior to this, he held positions in patient care and clinical and research laboratories at Methodist Hospital, Pennsylvania Hospital, and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Holmes holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology, with a Senior Thesis in Medical Sociology, awarded in 1976 from the University of Pennsylvania. He earned a Master of Science degree in Information Systems in 1987 from the College of Information Studies at Drexel University, and earned his doctorate in Information Science at Drexel in 1996. His dissertation, Evolution-Assisted Discovery of Sentinel Features in Epidemiologic Surveillance,” was the first work to apply evolutionary computation to epidemiologic research. He joined the faculty at Penn in 2001.
Dr. Holmes’s research interests are focused on several areas in medical informatics, all of which are directly linked to ongoing clinical research and public health. Specifically, his interests are in the evolutionary computation and machine learning approaches to knowledge discovery in databases (data mining), information systems infrastructures for epidemiologic surveillance, clinical decision support systems, semantic analysis, and information systems user (physician and patient) behavior. He has an international reputation for applying evolutionary computation to epidemiologic data mining. Dr. Holmes is Principal Investigator on a project in the Penn Center for Population Health and Health Disparities, the mission of which is to investigate approaches to reducing disparities in shared decision making by African-American men and their health care providers with respect to prostate cancer screening. He is a member of the Firearms Injury Center at Penn (FICAP), through which he is investigating firearms-related morbidity and mortality in an indigent, urban, mentally ill population, using new knowledge discovery methods. He has been a Co-Principal Investigator on a contract sponsored by the National Library of Medicine to investigate the development of a game-based approach to reducing delay in seeking care for suspected coronary syndrome events. He is also Co-Investigator on a project funded by the National Institute for Nursing Research to create and evaluate a decision aid for discharge planning in the elderly. Dr. Holmes serves as Associate Director of the Post-Doctoral Fellowship Program in Medical Informatics at the Veteran’s Administration Medical Center in Philadelphia.
jholmes@mail.med.upenn.edu
http://www.cceb.upenn.edu/main/people/holmesJ.html