Patricia Flatley Brennan Inducted into Medical and Biological Engineering Elite

April 7, 2020

The American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) has announced the induction of Patricia Flatley. Brennan, RN, Ph.D., Director, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health to its College of Fellows.

Election to the AIMBE College of Fellows is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to a medical and biological engineer. The College of Fellows is comprised of the top two percent of medical and biological engineers. College membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to "engineering and medicine research, practice, or education” and to "the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of medical and biological engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to bioengineering education."

Dr. Brennan was nominated, reviewed, and elected by peers and members of the College of Fellows for “outstanding contributions to biomedical informatics leading to the acceleration of health care technologies to enhance patient self-management.”

Dr. Brennan is widely recognized for her 30-year academic career transforming health care through innovations in home care technologies. Coinciding with the emergence of patient-centered care and shortened hospital stays, her work has extended health information technologies from the hospital and clinic to the home and community.

Her work has leveraged advances in computer science, telecommunications, and visualization to design and evaluate web-based and mobile platform strategies that support patient self-management to reduce social isolation and increase engagement with clinical care providers. She has provided design guidance for patient-facing computer systems and developed innovative modular architectures for patient self-monitoring. Dr. Brennan serves as a pioneer of immersive virtual reality scenarios that employ context-specific visual cues to accelerate design of technologies that ‘fit’ into the daily lives of patients with complex, chronic conditions.

AIMBE Fellows are among the most distinguished medical and biological engineers including 3 Nobel Prize laureates, 18 Fellows having received the Presidential Medal of Science and/or Technology and Innovation, and 173 also inducted to the National Academy of Engineering, 84 inducted to the National Academy of Medicine and 37 inducted to the National Academy of Sciences.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) is a leader in research in biomedical informatics and data science and the world’s largest biomedical library. NLM conducts and supports research in methods for recording, storing, retrieving, preserving, and communicating health information. NLM creates resources and tools that are used billions of times each year by millions of people to access and analyze molecular biology, biotechnology, toxicology, environmental health, and health services information. Additional information is available at https://www.nlm.nih.gov.