UCSD professor to be new editor of medical journal JAMIA

Lucila Ohno-Machado, MD, PhD, FACMI and founding chief of the division of biomedical informatics at the University of California, San Diego, has been named editor of the American Medical Informatics Association's journal, JAMIA.

Informatics is a broad field that combines information science and technologies with other sciences, most notably in health, biology and medicine.

Since joining UC San Diego in 2009, Ohno-Machado has worked closely with physicians, academic departments and scientists at the San Diego supercomputer centre and at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information to organise and utilise information technologies to improve patient care and research efforts.

JAMIA is jointly published by the 4,000-member AMIA and the BMJ Group, a London-based publisher of medical journals. It is bimonthly, presenting peer-reviewed articles about new scientific results, innovations, reviews, analyses and opinions related to basic research and applications of informatics methods to biomedicine and health.

The journal provides a major channel, both in print and online, for research in biomedical informatics while also publishing articles that assist informaticians, computer scientists, life scientists, physicians, nurses, pharmacists, dentists, and other health care professionals as they develop and apply biomedical and health informatics techniques and results to patient care, public health, human biology, teaching, research, administration and related policy.

Ohno-Machado will begin her four-year tenure as editor on 1 January 2011, with a possible additional four-year term if approved by the AMIA board of directors in late 2013.