Patricia Flatley Brennan, a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, has been appointed by National Institutes of Heath Director Francis Collins as the new director of the National Library of Medicine effective August.
“Patti brings her incredible experience of having cared for patients as a practicing nurse, improved the lives of home-bound patients by developing innovative information systems and services designed to increase their independence, and pursued cutting-edge research in data visualization and virtual reality,” Collins said in a release issued Wednesday.
Brennan was the Lillian L. Moehlman Bascom Professor at UW-Madison, the lead of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery’s living environments laboratory and a former American Medical Informatics Association president.
She has previously worked on the development of patient information systems such as HeartCare, an online information and communication service designed to support home-based cardiac patients, and ComputerLink, an electronic network that seeks to facilitate self-care for outpatients.
“This combination of skills makes her ideally suited to lead the NLM in the era of precision medicine,” added Collins.
NLM is the world’s largest biomedical library that maintains a range of print and electronic information, as well as supports and conducts biomedical and health informatics technology research, development, and training.