Vimla L Patel, PhD, DSc, FRSC, FACMI,
FIAHSI

Professor (Adjunct)
Department of Biomedical Informatics
Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons
Columbia University Irving Medical Center

Former Senior Research Scientist, and
Director, Center for Cognitive Studies in
Medicine and Public Health,
The New York Academy of Medicine,
New York, NY

E-mail: vimla.patel@columbia.edu
vimla.patel@shortliffe.net [Personal]

Web page: www.lodhia-patel.net

Brief Biography:

Dr. Patel is a professor (adjunct) at Columbia University and at Weill Cornell Medical Center. She is a former Senior Research Scientist and the director of the Center for Cognitive Studies in Medicine and Public Health at the New York Academy of Medicine. She holds a BSc in Biochemistry from the University of Otago in New Zealand and an MA (1980) and a Ph.D. (1981) in Educational and Cognitive Psychology (Medical Cognition) from McGill University in Montreal. As Professor of Medicine and the director of the Cognitive Science Center at McGill, her early research focused on the scientific foundations of medical and health education, particularly the cognitive foundations of medical decision-making. Subsequently, she expanded these research activities with an informatics focus (cognitive informatics) at Columbia and Arizona State Universities, as well as at the University of Texas-Houston, where she was appointed as professor in their departments of Biomedical Informatics. She also held joint or adjunct appointments at the NY Institute of Mental Health (Columbia), the Department of Psychology (ASU), and the School of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health Science (UTH). This allowed her to explore the relationships among cognitive, behavioral, and information sciences in the biomedical domain. Her current scholarship integrates cognition, informatics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science to advance the augmentation of human intelligence in clinical and public health contexts.

Dr. Patel is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Academy of Social Sciences) (1996), the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) (1996), and the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI) (2017). She received Sweden's annual Woman of Science Award (1994) and an Honorary Doctor of Science degree from the University of Victoria for her pioneering contributions to cognitive studies in health informatics. She is the 2021 recipient of the AMIA William W. Stead Award for Thought Leadership in Informatics, recognizing her introduction of cognitive science frameworks into biomedical informatics, and in 2025, she was named an ACMI Distinguished Fellow for exemplary leadership and discipline-shaping interdisciplinary research.

Dr. Patel is a Springer Series Editor for Cognitive Informatics in Healthcare and Biomedicine and has held editorial roles with Journal of Biomedical Informatics (Associate Editor), AI in Medicine (Assistant Editor), Medical Decision Making, Methods of Information in Medicine, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Topics in Cognitive Science, and Computers in Biology and Medicine.

Dr. Patel is deeply committed to the education and mentorship of emerging scholars. She has supervised 34 master's students, 23 doctoral students, and 23 postdoctoral fellows and research trainees.