Researcher | Research Background
Ken Mandl directs the Computational Health Informatics Program at Boston Children’s Hospital and is the Donald A.B. Lindberg Professor of Pediatrics and Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. He is trained as a pediatrician and pediatric emergency physician.
His work at the intersection of population and individual health exerts a sustained influence on the developing field of biomedical informatics. He was a real time biosurveillance pioneer. Having long advocated for patient participation in producing and accessing data, Mandl was a designer of the first personal health and participatory surveillance systems.
Cognizant of electronic health record system limitations, Mandl was a developer of SMART on FHIR (substitutable apps running universally on health IT) for innovators to reach large markets and patients and doctors to access an “app store for health.” Through his influence on the 21st Century Cures Act, federal regulations require support for SMART interfaces, ensuring standardized access to individual and population data at system scale, “without special effort.”
He leads the federated Genomic Information Commons across nine top children’s hospitals and directs the Boston Children’s Hospital PrecisionLink Biobank for Health Discovery.
Dr. Mandl has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, American Society for Clinical Investigation, Society for Pediatric Research, American College of Medical Informatics and American Pediatric Society. He is a recipient of the he Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the Donald A.B. Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics and the Clifford A. Barger Award for top mentors at Harvard Medical School. His trainees lead informatics in academia and in the world’s largest technology companies.
He was advisor to two Directors of the CDC and chaired the Board of Scientific Counselors of the NIH’s National Library of Medicine.
Dr. Mandl teaches and mentors extensively at the postgraduate level and leads an NIH-funded training program in biomedical informatics and genomics.