Amar Das MD, PhD (Assist. Professor, Stanford University)
Dr. Das is currently a professor at Stanford where his responsibilities include research, education and clinical care.  Previously he was an attending in psychiatry at NY Psychiatric Institute and New York Presbyterian Hospital (Columbia University).  Amar has a strong research background in psychiatry, and in the field of medical informatics (decision support, data management methods in clinical information systems).  He has also been an NIH Fellow, holds a journal editorial position, and has more than 20 published papers in peer-reviewed journals.  Amar received his BA from Northwestern University, and his MD, PhD from Stanford University. 

Robert Greenes MD, PhD (Professor, Harvard University)
Dr. Greenes is a Professor of Radiology (Brigham and Women’s Hospital), of Health Policy & Management, and of Health Sciences and Technology all at Harvard University.  He is also the Director of the Harvard-MIT Biomedical Informatics Program, which has trained individuals who have gone on to become leaders in both academia and industry.  Bob’s interests are computerized decision support, and standards to support integration of knowledge into clinical information systems: he has authored over 250 original publications in biomedical informatics.

He has been elected to prestigious membership in the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and to fellowship in the American College of Medical Informatics, American College of Radiology, and the Society of Computer Applications in Radiology; and has been the past president of the American College of Medical Informatics.  He holds a BA from the University of Michigan and MD and PhD from Harvard Medical School. 

Deborah McGuinness PhD (Co-Director, Knowledge Systems Labs, Stanford)
Dr. McGuinness is co-director and senior research scientist at the Knowledge Systems Division of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University. She has been working in knowledge representation and reasoning environments for ontology creation and maintenance for over 20 years. She has built and deployed numerous ontology environments and ontology applications, including some that have been in continuous use for over a decade at AT&T and Lucent.

Deborah is a leader in ontology-based tools and applications, is the author of over 100 original papers, and holds 5 patents.  Her work is aimed at providing languages that enable the next generation of web applications: moving from a web aimed at human consumption to the semantic web aimed at machine consumption in support of intelligent assistants and web agents.  Other areas of interest include knowledge representation and reasoning systems, information organization, filtering object presentations and explanations, and ontology-enhanced research.  She joined Stanford in 1998 after having spent over 18 years at AT&T Labs.  Deborah holds a BS from Duke, an MS from the University of California at Berkeley and a PhD from Rutgers.    

Joel Weissman PhD (Assoc. Professor, Harvard Medical School)
Dr. Weissman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine and the Institute for Health Policy at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and a Lecturer in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School.  Joel’s main research interests lie in the areas of health care financing, the effects of competition on health system behavior, access to care, and measurement issues associated with access, quality of care, and risk adjustment.  He has over 70 publications and has co-authored the book “Falling Through the Safety Net: Insurance Status and Access to Care" (foreword by Hillary Rodham Clinton).

He divides his time between work in the area of patient safety, and projects aimed at understanding the social determinants of health care.  In patient safety, he is principal investigator of funded investigations examining the relation of hospital crowding to adverse events, the development of natural language processing to identify adverse events, the role of weekend care and the July phenomenon, and the reporting and disclosure of medical errors in hospitals.  In the access area, he directs a study exploring the socio-cultural determinants of mammography re-screening, and the preparedness of medical residents to provide cross-cultural care.  Joel holds an SB (Phi Beta Kappa) and MCP from MIT and a PhD from Brandeis.

Business Advisors

Nazim Kareemi (Founder and former Chairman, Canesta)
Nazim co-founded Canesta (venture backed by Venrock, Apax, Carlyle, JP Morgan) in 1999, and has many years of experience in the high technology industry in engineering and management positions.

Prior to Canesta, he founded VC-backed PenWare, which established itself as a leader in spreadsheets for mobile devices.  PenWare acquired another company to successfully enter retail point of sale terminal market and became public in 1996.   Before founding PenWare, he held engineering positions or consulted for companies such as Zilog, Xerox, and Intel.  He has a SB from MIT, and an MSEE from Stanford University.

Ashfaq Munshi (CEO, Radiance)
Ashfaq is the CEO and Chairman at Radiance Technologies.  In addition to Radiance, Ash has founded three other Silicon Valley companies: Vivecon (where he currently serves on the Board), SpecialtyMD (acquired by Ventro), and Commerce Engine (became Ariba).  Ashfaq holds an AB in Mathematics from Harvard, has completed graduate work in computer science at Brown and UCSC, and is an alumnus of the Stanford Graduate School of Business.