Department Chair William Hersh Elected to Honorific Computer Science Academy

William Hersh, MD, Professor and Chair of the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology (DMICE), has been elected to the SIGIR Academy.

The Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) is part of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), which is the academic society for the field of computer science. SIGIR focuses on research and development of information retrieval (IR, also know as search) systems. Dr. Hersh’s research over the decades has focused on IR methods applied in biomedicine.

Dr. Hersh is also an elected member of the national (American College of Medical Informatics, ACMI) and international (International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics, IAHSI) honorific societies for the field of biomedical and health informatics. He currently serves as President of IAHSI.

Dr. Hersh’s research accomplishments include 167 peer-reviewed papers, with a Google Scholar H-index of 74 that ranks 25th all-time among IR researchers. He is author of the book, Information Retrieval: A Biomedical and Health Perspective (4th edition, Springer, 2020). Dr. Hersh has organized a number of challenge evaluations in the biomedical domain under the guise of the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC). His current research, funded by an R01 grant from the National Library of Medicine, focuses on IR methods applied to EHR data for use in cohort discovery.

Dr. Hersh will be inducted into the SIGIR Academy at the SIGIR 2022 meeting in Madrid, Spain this summer.