Dr. Brinkley received a B.A. in mathematics
from Amherst College in 1970, an M.D. from the University of Washington
in 1974, and a Ph.D. in medical computer engineering from Stanford University
in 1984. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Washington,
Department of Bioengineering from 1974-77, and a Research Associate in
the Stanford Department of Computer Science from 1984-1988. He joined the
faculty of the Department of Biological Structure in 1988. He is currently
a Research Professor in Biological Structure, joint with the Division of
Biomedical and Health Informatics of the Dept of Medical Education, and
adjunct with the Dept of Computer Science and Engineering. He is a fellow
of the American College of Medical Informatics, and is on the editorial
board of the Journal of the American Medical Association and the Journal
of Biomedical Informatics. He is co-director (with Cornelius Rosse) of
the Structural Informatics Group at the University of Washington,
http://sig.biostr.washington.edu.
He coined the term Structural Informatics in 1990 as a branch of Medical
Informatics having to do with the application of computer and information
technology to problems in structural biology at levels ranging from organs
to molecules. Within the UW Structural Informatics Group the long range
goals are to develop methods for representing information about the physical
organization of the body, and to use these representations to develop a
“structural information framework” for organizing biomedical knowledge.
Current projects include: 1) anatomical enhancements to the National
Library of Medicine’s Unified Medical Language System, 2) a symbolic foundational
model of anatomy, 3) the Digital Anatomist information system, and 4) the
University of Washington Human Brain Project.