Dr. Stead is a pioneer in the field of bio-informatics. He serves as a Senior Advisor for ICA, and is an Associate Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs and Director of the Informatics Center at Vanderbilt University.
Dr. Stead is also a McKesson Foundation Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Professor of Medicine. He is a Founding Fellow of both the American College of Medical Informatics and the American Institute for Engineering in Biology and Medicine, and an elected member of both the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies and the American Clinical and Climatological Association. He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, and served as President of the American Association for Medical Systems and Informatics and the American College of Medical Informatics.
He presently serves on the Computer Science and Telecommunication Board of the National Research Council. He served as Chairman of the Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine, and as a Presidential appointee to the Commission on Systemic Interoperability. In addition to his academic and advisory responsibilities, Dr Stead is a Director of HealthStream and Director of NetSilica.
Dr. Stead received his B.A. and M.D. from Duke University, where he also completed specialty and subspecialty training in Internal Medicine and Nephrology. In the 1960s, he was a member of the team that developed the Cardiology Databank. As a faculty member in Nephrology, he was involved in the partnership that developed The Medical Record (TMR). While at Duke, Dr. Stead built one of the first patient-centered hospital information systems. He has led (as PI) prominent academic health centers, including Duke and VMC, through both planning and implementation phases of large-scale, Integrated Advanced Information Management System (IAIMS) projects.