Earlier this month, National Institutes of Health Director Francis S. Collins, M.S., Ph.D., named NAM member Patricia Flatley Brennan, R.N., Ph.D., as the new director of the National Library of Medicine (NLM). The NLM is the world’s largest biomedical library and producer of digital information services used by scientists.
For over 25 years Brennan has developed and evaluated technologies to support patients in the home, including ComputerLink, an electronic network designed to reduce isolation and improve self-care among home care patients, and HeartCare, a WWW-based tailored information and communication service that helps home-dwelling cardiac patients recover faster and with fewer symptoms. She directed the Project HealthDesign intitiative, a RWJF-funded program designed to stimulate the creation of the nex-generation of personal health information tools, Brennan currently leads the vizHOME project, designed to use virtual reality to accelerate the design of home-based technologies.
She received a master of science in nursing from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in industrial engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Following seven years of clinical practice in critical care nursing and psychiatric nursing, Dr. Brennan held several academic positions at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland; Marquette University, Milwaukee; and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A past president of the American Medical Informatics Association, Dr. Brennan was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2001. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing, the American College of Medical Informatics, and the New York Academy of Medicine. Dr. Brennan will begin her new role this August. Read More >>
