Marcelo Fiszman, MD, PhD, FACMI

Dr. Fiszman received an MD degree from the State University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, undertook residencies in Internal Medicine and Biomedical Informatics, then emigrated to the US where he received a PhD in Biomedical Informatics from the University of Utah. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Library of Medicine, and at the time of his election to fellowship was a Research Scientist at the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications. He also previously held academic appointments as an Instructor in Biomedical Informatics at the University of Sao Paulo, Research Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Utah, and Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Tennessee.

Dr. Fiszman has made significant contributions to foundational research in natural language processing for both clinical practice and biomedical research. His work has concentrated on developing robust, sustainable methods, that contribute to advances in both biomedical research and clinical practice. Dr. Fiszman’s early work on symbolic methods for processing electronic medical records, via an application called SymTex, has been recognized as influencing later developments such as i2b2. More recently, he has pursued creative research in symbolic natural language processing (with a program called SemRep) and semantic abstraction automatic summarization. These efforts are being implemented at NLM in Semantic MEDLINE, which combines information retrieval, semantic processing, automatic summarization, and knowledge visualization for enhanced access to the biomedical research literature. His election to the College recognizes these technical and professional accomplishment.