IGPI Advisory Council
The Advisory Council assists in managing the IGPI program. Each subtrack Coordinating Committee appoints one of its members as its representative to the Advisory Council for an initial three-year term. The IGPI Advisory Council's responsibilities include, but are not limited to, establishing IGPI policies and procedures (including those for proposing new informatics subtracks), acting on student petitions, approving new courses, managing University-funded graduate assistant allocations on a competitive basis, planning and coordinating informatics-related events (e.g., conferences, workshops), and recommending approval of new informatics subtracks to the Graduate College.
Dr. Keller received his B.S. degree in biology from the University of Illinois in 1974, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Biological Materials from Northwestern University in 1978 and 1982, respectively. Following a six-year faculty career at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) in Charleston, SC, he was appointed Associate Professor of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery and the Dows Institute for Dental Research in 1988. He was promoted to full Professor and received tenure in 1991
Since arriving, he has teamed with noted professor and pediatrician Jeffrey Murray, M.D., to secure a $10 million grant from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research at the National Institutes of Health. He serves as associate director of the project, which engages in comprehensive oral research devoted to craniofacial anomalies. His current work centers on cellular and tissue responses to implant materials, mechanisms of biomedical implant fixation, and surface characteristics of biomaterials and their effects on tissue reactions.
Since 1976, he has published more than 200 journal articles, book chapters, book reviews, and abstracts and has been invited to lecture at universities and professional conferences across the United States.
Dean Keller is a fellow of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science and of the Academy for Dental Materials. He continues to teach in the School of Dentistry, and directs both doctoral and master's candidates.
He also served four years on the Board of Directors including president, of the American Association of Dental Research (AADR), the largest dental research organization in the United States.
Dale Eric Wurster joined the Graduate College team in January 2002. At the time of his appointment he was already familiar with many of the administrative functions of the Graduate College, having served two terms on Graduate Council as well as serving on several ad-hoc Graduate College committees.
As Associate Dean, he is in charge of managing and supporting the curriculum and academic activities of the graduate faculty and graduate students in approximately 100 graduate programs enrolling over 6,000 students.
Dr. Wurster received his Bachelor of Science Degree in Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin (Madison) in 1974. The Ph.D. Degree (Physical Pharmacy) was granted in 1979 by Purdue University. Upon graduation, Dr. Wurster joined the faculty of the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) as an Assistant Professor in the School of Pharmacy. Since 1982 he has been on the faculty of the University of Iowa College of Pharmacy, where he was promoted to Associate Professor in 1987 and to Professor in 1996. In addition to his professorial duties, he was Division Head of Pharmaceutics from January 1 of 2000 through December 31 of 2001, and has been the Associate Dean of the University of Iowa Graduate College since January 1 of 2002.
Dr. Wurster is a Fellow of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists, and a member of the American Chemical Society, Materials Research Society, American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy, Rho Chi Society, and Society of Sigma Xi. He serves on the Foreign Pharmacy Graduate Examination Commission of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy and is a member of the United States Pharmacopeial Convention Committee of Experts (1995-2000, 2000-2005, and 2005-2010).
Marc Armstrong is serving as interim Director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He is a geographer by inclination and training, with baccalaureate (SUNY-Plattsburgh), masters (UNC-Charlotte) and doctoral (University of Illinois) degrees in that discipline. Armstrong has been a faculty member at Iowa since 1984, rising to the rank of Professor in 1998. He was named a Collegiate Fellow in 2005.
Professor Armstrong has considerable experience in academic administration. In particular, he has served as Departmental Executive Officer of the Department of Geography since 2000, as an Administrative Fellow in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in 2006 and 2007, and as interim Dean for Research in CLAS during the fall of 2006. In addition, he has served on several committees such as The University of Iowa's Information Technology Advisory Committee and the Graduate Council (the executive committee of the Graduate College).
Armstrong's research is in the area of geographic information science. He has published more than 100 academic papers and is also co-author or co-editor of several monographs. Specific areas of interest include high performance computing for geographic applications and privacy issues associated with the use of geographic information technologies. Armstrong has served as North American Editor of the International Journal of Geographical Information Science and he now serves as an editorial board member of four journals. He has also served on two study panels convened by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences.
James Cremer is professor and chairman of the Computer Science Department at The University of Iowa. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1989, and has co-authored more than 50 technical papers. His research interests include virtual environments, real-time graphics and animation, scenario authoring, terrain modeling and rendering, contact and collision in multibody dynamics simulation, and visualization and analysis of genetic likelihood spaces. Research projects include the Hank virtual bicycling and driving simulator, "This Old Digital City" (an immersive virtual environment for a history museum), and the National Advanced Driving Simulator. He is an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation.
Dr. Kienzle received his medical degree from the University of Iowa and residency and fellowship training at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, in internal medicine, cardiology and cardiac electrophysiology. Since his arrival at the University of Iowa in 1984, he has held a number of positions, including Director of Cardiac Electrophysiology, Assistant Director for Clinical Programs, Division of Cardiovascular Diseases, Associate Dean for Clinical Affairs and Biomedical Communications and Associate Director (Chief Technology Officer), University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics.
Kienzle has served on the Telemedicine Subcommittee of the Federal Communications Commission and chaired the Ad Hoc Task Force on Telemedicine of the American College of Cardiology. He has directed the National Laboratory for the Study of Rural Telemedicine, an NLM-funded research and development program. Dr. Kienzel has been awarded over $14M in federal grants and contracts to conduct telehealth research. He was a founding board member of the AAMC Group on Information Resources (GIR) and recently served as the Chair of GIR. He has served on the IAIMS: The Next Generation task force, a group providing long term strategic planning for the National Library of Medicine. Dr. Kienzle serves on the Board of Trustee.
Dr. Kienzle's current responsibilities include technology transfer, business development, technology planning and strategy, continuing medical education and provider credentialing. His research interests include focus on the study of telemedicine and medical informatics. In addition, expertise includes rural wide-area networks, Internet-based health education and service applications, including home health care and direct to patient communications.
Thomas Casavant received the B.S. degree in Computer Science with high distinction in 1982 from the University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa. He received the M.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1983, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Iowa in 1986. In 1986, Dr. Casavant joined the School of Electrical Engineering at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana as an Assistant Professor specializing in the design and analysis of parallel/distributed computing systems, environments, algorithms, and programs. From June 1987 to June 1988, he was Director of the PASM Parallel Processing Project. From July 1988 until July 1989 Dr. Casavant was Director of the Purdue EE School's Parallel Processing Laboratory.
Dr. Casavant has published over 150 technical papers on parallel and distributed computing, Bioinformatics, as well as medical genetics and molecular biology, and has presented his work at tutorials, invited lectures, and conferences in the United States, Asia and Europe. His work in the area of distributed computing includes design and implementation of an operating system for a point-to-point network of work-stations to behave as a single integrated transparent multiprocessor, contributions to the design of the AT&T 3B4000 distributed multiprocessor system at AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1984, research in parallel computer architecture and systems, the design and analysis of load-balancing-based scheduling algorithms, distributed algorithm modeling, routing and task management in parallel systems, graph theory, and research in theory and implementation of trace recovery and programming tools for parallel/distributed computing.
Padmini Srinivasan, PhD is Professor of the University of Iowa's School of Library Information Science, Department of Management Science, Computer Science Department (Courtesy) and College of Nursing (Courtesy). Srinivasan, who is also a Research Fellow in the Henry B. Tippie College of Business, joined the University of Iowa in 1989.
Professor Srinivasan earned an M.S., (Hons) in Biological Sciences from Birla Institute of Technology and Science in 1978 and her PhD in Information Studies, Syracuse University, 1985. Since her appointment Professor Srinivasan has been instrumental in the award of several grants to the SLIS including close to $1M to recruit and train 20 students in the area of digital librarianship. She was also the recipient of the prestigious Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
Her research interests include text mining, web mining, topical crawlers, text categorization, information filtering, formal models for information retrieval (with special emphasis on biomedical applications).
