Interim Director of Health Systems Institute Named
Gregory D. Abowd, Distinguished Professor in the School of Interactive Computing, was recently named by COE Dean Don Giddens as the interim director of the Health Systems Institute (HSI). Abowd has served as the associate director of HSI since August 2006.
The Health Systems Institute was created in 2005 as a multi-institutional and interdisciplinary initiative based at Georgia Tech, Emory University and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. HSI brings together the expertise of many disciplines to enable the development and implementation of novel interdisciplinary and collaborative research, education, and outreach programs to transform healthcare delivery systems and lead the nation away from an ineffective, reactive, disease-focused system to achieve a cost-effective, pro-active, health- and wellness-focused system. A new research seminar series at HSI will begin this spring featuring research applications in the field of healthcare which are being conducted by various faculty members at Georgia Tech, Emory University and Children's Healthcare of Atlanta.
Abowd’s research interests lie in the intersection between software engineering and human-computer interaction with a special emphasis in the area of applications of information technologies to the domain of autism research and services. Dr. Abowd received the degree of B.S. in Mathematics and Physics in 1986 from the University of Notre Dame. He then attended the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom on a Rhodes scholarship, earning the degrees of M.Sc. (1987) and D.Phil. (1991) in Computation from the Programming Research Group in the Computing Laboratory. From 1989-1992 he was a Research Associate/Postdoc with the Human-Computer Interaction Group in the Department of Computer Science at the University of York in England. From 1992-1994, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Software Engineering Institute and the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University.