Patricia Flatley Brennan, New Director of the National Library of Medicine,
Patricia Flatley Brennan, a University of Wisconsin—Madison professor of nursing and industrial engineering, has been named the fourth director of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the world’s largest biomedical library.
The announcement was made today by Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, where the library is headquartered.
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The announcement was made today by Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, where the library is headquartered.
“Patti brings her incredible experience of having cared for patients as a practicing nurse, improved the lives of homebound patients by developing innovative information systems and services designed to increase their independence, and pursued cutting edge research in data visualization and virtual reality,” says Collins. “This combination of skills makes her ideally suited to lead the NLM in the era of precision medicine, as the library becomes the epicenter for biomedical data science, not just at NIH, but across the biomedical research enterprise.”
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Brennan is an expert in the area of digital health information and communication. She has devised a number of programs to facilitate self care and improve health care outcomes among home-dwelling patients. Brennan also directed Project HealthDesign, an initiative of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to help inspire and develop the next generation of personal health records.
Brennan joined the UW–Madison faculty in 1996, coming to Wisconsin from Case Western Reserve University. She earned her doctorate in industrial engineering from UW–Madison in 1986.
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Near the top of the agenda for the library is creating a new strategic plan, says Brennan.
“We’ll be preparing the library for its third century,” she explains, noting that we now live in an age awash in health data and information that needs to be organized, curated and shared. “People can’t read or analyze information fast enough. We need to prepare for a library where information is not necessarily cognitively mediated. Information will become embedded in the structure of our lives.”
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Brennan is expected to join NIH in August 2016.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
