position as president and chief executive officer of the American Medical Informatics Association, an organization that he helped to form between 1988 and 1990 when he was President of the Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care. In late 2011 he announced his intention to step down from this position in 2012. Biography and career Shortliffe grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, until his family moved to Connecticut when he was 6. He attended the Loomis School in Connecticut (now Loomis Chaffee School) and later Gresham's School in the United Kingdom. His father was a physician and hospital administrator; his mother, an English teacher. He has one brother and one sister. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he started working in the computer laboratory of G. Octo Barnett at Massachusetts General Hospital and realized that he could have a career spanning both medicine and computing. After receiving an AB in applied mathematics magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1970, he received an M.D. (1976) and Ph.D. in Medical Information Systems (1975) from Stanford University, with a dissertation on the MYCIN system, for which he also won the 1976 Grace Murray Hopper Award for outstanding computer scientists under the age of 30. He completed internal medicine house-staff training from 1976-1979 at Massachusetts General Hospital and Stanford Hospital. In 1979 he joined the Stanford faculty in internal medicine and computer science, where he directed the Stanford University Medical EXpertimental computer resource (SUMEX) and subsequently the Center for Advanced Medical Informatics at Stanford (CAMIS), continuing his work on expert systems, including ONCOCIN (an oncology decision support program), T-HELPER, and other projects in the Stanford Heuristic Programming Project. He also simultaneously served as chief of general internal medicine and associate chair of medicine for primary care, and was principal investigator of the InterMed Collaboratory, which developed the science of computable guidelines for medical decision support. In 1980 he founded one of the earliest formal degree programs in biomedical informatics at Stanford University, emphasizing a rigorous and experimentalist approach. From 2003-2007 he served on the Board of Directors of Medco Health Solutions, a large pharmacy benefits manager headquartered in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey. In 2000 he moved to Columbia University as chair of the department of biomedical informatics, deputy vice president (Columbia University Medical Center), senior associate dean for strategic information resources (College of Physicians and Surgeons), professor of medicine, professor of computer science, and director