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Announcing the 2022 Miles Conrad Awardee — Dr. Patricia Brennan

Announcing the 2022 Miles Conrad Awardee — Dr. Patricia Brennan

December 2021

We are delighted to announce that Dr. Patricia Brennan, Director of the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) will be the recipient of the 2022 Miles Conrad Award, a lifetime achievement award for those working in the information community.

As an internationally renowned member of our community, Dr. Brennan will join a long list of industry leaders, innovators, and opinion-makers who have received this prestigious award. She will deliver the Miles Conrad Lecture on February 16 at 12.30pm (Eastern Standard Time, US & Canada), as part of NISO Plus 2022.

“Continuing the tradition of recognizing esteemed leaders in our community, the Board of NISO is pleased to recognize the many contributions of Dr. Brennan,” said Todd A. Carpenter, NISO’s Executive Director. “Her many accomplishments have significantly contributed to improving access to health information and scientific content distribution more generally. She embodies so many of the characteristics that the NISO Board aims to recognize by continuing the tradition of the Miles Conrad Award.  We look forward to hearing her talk during the NISO Plus conference in February.”

All about Dr. Brennan

Patricia Flatley Brennan, RN, PhD, assumed her position at NLM, one of the 27 Institutes and Centers of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in August 2016.  As the center for biomedical and health data science research, NLM is the world’s largest biomedical library and the producer of digital information services used by scientists, health professionals and members of the public worldwide. Since joining the Library, Dr. Brennan has positioned it to be the hub of data science at NIH and a national and international leader in the field, spearheading the development of a new strategic plan that envisions NLM as a platform for biomedical discovery and data-powered health, in order to accelerate data-driven discovery and health, engage with new users in new ways, and develop the workforce for a data-driven future.

Dr. Brennan received a Master of Science in Nursing from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in Industrial Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After seven years of clinical practice in critical care nursing and psychiatric nursing, Dr. Brennan went on to hold several academic positions at Marquette University, Milwaukee; Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland; and, before joining NLM, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was Lillian L. Moehlman Bascom Professor at the School of Nursing and College of Engineering. She also led the Living Environments Laboratory at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, which develops new ways for effective visualization of high-dimensional data.

A Past President of the American Medical Informatics Association, Dr. Brennan was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences (now the National Academy of Medicine) in 2001. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing, the American College of Medical Informatics, and the New York Academy of Medicine. In 2020, Dr. Brennan was inducted into the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), which is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to a medical and biological engineer.

All about the Miles Conrad Award

Miles Conrad was one of the founders of the National Federation of Abstracting and Indexing Services (NFAIS), and this award was established in 1965 in his memory. During the 1960s, Conrad encouraged NFAIS members — scholarly societies and government agencies — to work collaboratively in support of the space exploration program, in order to enhance the speed with which scientific knowledge could be disseminated, discovered, and acted upon. In the years that followed, NFAIS expanded its cross-disciplinary membership and played an important role in the development of online information services and resources, before merging with National Information Standards Organization (NISO) in 2019. NISO’s vision, of a world where all can benefit from the unfettered exchange of information, reflects the aims of both organizations; in awarding this prize, we are proud to continue recognizing the contributions of those whose lifetime achievements have moved our community forward. For information about previous Miles Conrad Awardees, please visit https://www.niso.org/awards/MCA.