Charles Friedman is the Josiah Macy Jr. Professor and Chair of the Department of Learning Health Sciences at the University of Michigan Medical School. In recent years, he has focused his academic interests and activities on the concept of Learning Health Systems, and the socio-technical infrastructure required to achieve them.

Dr. Friedman’s department is a “first in the nation” medical school academic department dedicated to the sciences of learning at all levels from scale:  from learning by individuals, to learning by teams and organizations, and learning by ultra-large scale systems such as entire nations.  It is home to an interdisciplinary faculty; a new graduate program in “Health Infrastructures and Learning Systems”; and a new journal, Learning Health Systems, for which he serves as Editor in Chief.

Prior to coming to Michigan, Friedman held executive positions at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: from 2007 to 2009 as Deputy National Coordinator and from 2009 to 2011 as ONC's Chief Scientific Officer. Immediately prior to his work in the government, Dr. Friedman was Associate Vice Chancellor for Biomedical Informatics, and Founding Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh.