George Hripcsak is the Vivian Beaumont Allen Professor and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University. He is also the director of medical informatics services for New York Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia Campus and a board-certified internist. He led the effort to create the Arden Syntax, a language for representing health knowledge that has become a national standard. As chair of the American Medical Informatics Association Standards Committee, he coordinated the medical informatics community response to the Department of Health and Human Services for the health informatics standards rules under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. He co-chaired the Meaningful Use Workgroup of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’s Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology. He directs the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) coordinating center. His current research is on the clinical information stored in electronic health records. Using data mining techniques, he is developing the methods necessary to support clinical research and patient safety initiatives. Dr. Hripcsak is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine. He has an M.D. and an M.S. in biostatistics from Columbia University.