Table of Contents
Smith Named Dean of UT School
of Health Information Sciences
Jack W. Smith, M.D., Ph.D., has been named dean of The University of Texas School of Health Information Sciences at Houston (SHIS).
Jack W. Smith, M.D., Ph.D.
James T. Willerson, M.D., president of the UT Health Science Center at Houston, announced the executive appointment. “Dr. Smith has proved himself to be an excellent leader, builder, scientist and educator throughout his time at our institution,” Willerson said. “I know that he will do an outstanding job leading our smallest but most unique school to great accomplishments.”
Smith had served as professor and interim SHIS dean since January 2003, following the December 2002 retirement of Doris L. Ross, Ph.D., who had led the school since 1992. In addition to his deanship at SHIS, Smith has a faculty appointment in the UT Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Houston.
He was a founder of the office of medical informatics and health care systems at NASA’s Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center and served as its first deputy director.
“I still work at NASA two days a week,” Smith said. “And I am currently leading a project creating a risk assessment model to be used in the design and implementation of health care systems to support extended human exploration missions to the moon and Mars under President Bush’s new vision for space exploration.”
Smith joined the UT Health Science Center in 1998 as the first chairman of the Department of Health Informatics. In 2001, he was appointed as SHIS associate dean for research.
“I am eager to continue working with Dr. Willerson to build on a number of strengths at SHIS, such as a diverse student body, innovative research collaborations and expansion into areas like bioinformatics, bioengineering, neuroinformatics, public health informatics, translational research informatics, as well as biological system modeling,” he said.
Smith said that health informatics research is playing an increasingly crucial role in health care, such as helping to reduce the high number of medical errors. “About 98,000 people die each year due to medical errors,” he said. “That’s more than the number of people who die of AIDS and motor vehicle accidents combined.”
SHIS is the newest school at the health science center, replacing the School of Allied Health Sciences in 1997. It offers master’s and Ph.D. candidates an interdisciplinary graduate education, bringing together computer scientists and health care professionals to discover how best to compile, manage and distribute health-related information.
“Our goal is to advance personalized health care by providing the right information to the right person at the right time in the right format,” Smith said. “We educate our graduates to use health information technology to do just that.”
He received his medical degree from West Virginia University Medical School in 1977, and his doctorate in computer and information sciences from Ohio State University in 1986. His undergraduate degree in physics is from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Board certified in pathology, Smith earned his computer science doctorate in the area of artificial intelligence.
His current research focuses on modeling clinician understanding and the implementation of systems to supporting tutoring and the decision-making processes of health care specialists, flight surgeons and biomedical engineers.
By David R. Bates, Public Affairs