NLM ADA Lovelace Lecture Series

Suzanne Bakken, PhD, RN, FAAN, FACMI, FIAHSI, Alumni Professor of Nursing and Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University will present the National Library of Medicine’s Ada Lovelace Computational Health Lecture. The title of her talk will be “Implications of Poetical Science for Advancing Health Equity through Information Visualization.”

Ada Bryon Lovelace developed the idea of Poetical Science, which emphasizes the importance of intuition and image in mathematics and science. Poetical Science comprises three key features: observation, interpretation, and integration. A brilliant mathematician, Lovelace is broadly recognized as the first computer programmer. A key example of Poetical Science is her observation of a punch card-driven loom in a weaving factory that subsequently led to the mathematics that operationalized Charles Babbage’s computing machine. In this talk, Dr. Bakken will use the lens of Poetical Science to describe a program of research focused on advancing health equity of urban Latinos through use of information visualization. This will include the integration of perspectives from the fields of health equity, nursing science, health literacy, health communication, and information visualization.

Suzanne Bakken, PhD, RN, FAAN, FACMI, FIAHSI, is the Alumni Professor of Nursing and Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University. Following her doctorate in Nursing at the University of California, San Francisco, she completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Medical Informatics at Stanford University. Her program of research has focused on the intersection of informatics and health equity for more than 30 years and has been funded by AHRQ, NCI, NIMH, NINR, and NLM. Dr. Bakken’s program of research has resulted in more than 300 peer-reviewed papers. At Columbia Nursing, she leads the NINR-funded Precision in Symptom Self-Management (PriSSM) Center and Reducing Health Disparities Through Informatics (RHeaDI) Pre- and Post-doctoral Training Program.

She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing, American College of Medical Informatics, International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics, and a member of the National Academy of Medicine. Dr. Bakken has received multiple awards for her research including the Pathfinder Award from the Friends of the National Institute of Nursing Research, the Nursing Informatics Award from the Friends of the National Library of Medicine, the Sigma Theta Tau International Nurse Researchers Hall of Fame, and the Virginia K. Saba Award from the American Medical Informatics Association. Most recently, she was the first nurse recipient of the Francois Gremy Award from the International Medical Informatics Association. Dr. Bakken currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association and a member of the National Library of Medicine’s Board of Regents.

This lecture is sponsored by Dr. Milton Corn, MD, Acting Scientific Director, National Library of Medicine and David Landsman, PhD, Chief, Computational Biology Branch at the NLM’s National Center for Biotechnology Information.