Stephen B. Johnson, PhD, FACMI

Stephen Bennett Johnson is an Associate Professor of Medical Informatics at Columbia University. He received an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from McGill University. His doctorate was also in Computer Science, and he specialized in natural language processing at New York University. Dr. Johnson currently serves as the Director of Informatics for the Cancer Center at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, using information technology to assist in cancer care and research. He also directs the graduate degree program in medical informatics at Columbia.

Dr. Johnson has been deeply interested in the area of data modeling and the importance of bringing these techniques into medical informatics. He demonstrated the advantages of data modeling in building the Clinical Data Repository at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, one of the first large-scale relational databases in medicine. This work showed that a patient database could be both flexible and efficient. He has taught data modeling as a tutorial at the AMIA Annual Symposium for several years and at the Woods Hole course on informatics. He has also been a participant in the Unified Medical Language System, with a special interest in showing how data modeling resources can contribute to the area of natural language processing. Dr. Johnson has worked for several years to create a detailed curriculum for medical informatics, emphasizing the importance of the social sciences in providing theoretic foundations for the field. His current area of research is knowledge extraction from medical and scientific texts.