Faculty Profiles

Debra Calliss

Trevor Cohen

James Collofello

Partha Dasgupta

Dijiang Huang

Bill Lewis

Faye Navabi

Aviral Shrivastava

Guoliang Xue

Jieping Ye

faculty profiles

Trevor Cohen ,

Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical Informatics

While working as a physician in South Africa, Trevor Cohen sometimes treated psychotic patients without benefit of identifying documents or knowledge of their medical history. “Sometimes the only background we would have is that they were found by police in traffic,” Cohen said. “As far as patient records, we’d have notes of admission, but these were paper notes. They’d be arranged by month of admission over many years so if we didn’t know when this person was last admitted, we’d spend a lot of time going through the records. Someone would say, ‘I remember his name, but he also goes by this name.’”

“This sort of drew me to informatics,” Cohen remembered. “This was the most in need of information I’d ever been.” Informatics, the study of using computer technology to gather, synthesize, store, interpret and visualize information, is especially relevant in hospitals where quick access to patient records can mean the difference between life and death. When Cohen realized that biomedical informatics was becoming a defined field, he decided to get a Ph.D. from Columbia University’s Department of Biomedical Informatics.

Now a professor in ASU’s Department of Biomedical Informatics, Cohen is teaching a course on how cognitive science and medical informatics interface and acting as a co-principal investigator for a five-year, $5 million dollar grant from the James S. McDonnell Foundation for a multi-site collaborative study on a project titled, “Cognitive Complexity and Error in Critical Care.”

“Work of any complexity involves making mistakes and correcting them,” he said. “People will always make mistakes. We’re wanting to look at how people correct mistakes and start to reinforce these defenses that are already in place.”