John H. Holmes, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Medical Informatics in Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, USA. He is Associate Director of the Institute for Biomedical Informatics and Director of the Doctoral Program in Epidemiology.  Dr. Holmes’ research interests are focused on several areas in medical informatics, including evolutionary computation and machine learning approaches to knowledge discovery in clinical databases (data mining), interoperable information systems infrastructures for epidemiologic surveillance, clinical decision support systems, semantic analysis, and information systems user (physician and patient) behavior.  He is particularly interested in global health and biomedical informatics education. He is      Co-Chair of the International Affairs Committee of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and serves as the AMIA Representative to the International Medical Informatics Association. He is also actively involved in informatics capacity building in Botswana. Dr. Holmes is an elected Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and the American College of Epidemiology. He is a Senior Fellow of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, the Center for Public Health Initiatives, and Center for Health Behavior, all located at Penn.