Professor of Medical Informatics in Epidemiology
Dr. Holmes conducts research in medical informatics and epidemiology. His interests are in evolutionary computation and machine learning approaches to knowledge discovery in databases (data mining), information systems infrastructures for epidemiologic surveillance, clinical decision support systems, semantic analysis, text mining and information systems user (physician and patient) behavior. He is principal investigator on a project funded by the National Library of Medicine to investigate the use of online discussions as potential sources of adverse drug event data.
As a member of the University of Pennsylvania Comprehensive Cancer Center, Dr. Holmes also works on several cancer-related projects, including as a project principal investigator in the Penn Center for Population Health and Health Disparities. He is a co-investigator on numerous other National Institutes of Health-funded projects.
Dr. Holmes collaborates with investigators nationwide on data governance issues associated with distributed research networks and comparative effectiveness research. He serves as co-chair of the Data Governance Core of SPAN, a Kaiser-Colorado based project supported by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
Dr. Holmes' methodologic focus is in evolutionary computation, especially learning classifier systems. His work in evolutionary computation focuses on translational research that bridges the gap between theoretical, genetics-based computing and epidemiologic practice. This work includes adapting evolutionary computational techniques to risk assessment and discovery of clinical decision rules in large clinical databases. Dr. Holmes is continuing this work with extensions to distributed databases and the deployment of genetics-based intelligent agents in wide-scale knowledge discovery tasks in biomedicine and epidemiology. He is active in the international Learning Classifier System community.
He is an active member of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), having served as chair of the Education Committee, and is a member of the Membership, Working Group Steering and 10x10 Steering Committees. He currently serves on the AMIA board of directors and is chair of the board of directors of the Global Health Informatics Partnership. He is an elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) and the American College of Epidemiology.