Professor Craig Locatis, from the US National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health, presented as an international guest lecturer for the Information Science postgraduate students on 27 September 2021 via a virtual session.

Prof. Locatis lecture consisted of his research in Telemedicine and eHealth, identifying common misconceptions, describing evaluation criteria for telemedicine, discussing the effectiveness of telemedicine research findings, and also provided an overview of his research at the US National Library of Medicine.

Prof. Locatis short personal CV reads as follows:

For the past two years of my 42-year career at the US National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health, I have been managing a contact involving 65 people supporting NLM’s research and development program.  They do everything from supporting our servers and network to developing programs analyzing images, extracting knowledge from text, and ensuring interoperability of different health information database and medical record systems.  Prior to my current work, I conducted research on telemedicine, distance learning, and collaboration technology.  This work goes back to the very first days of videoconferencing over the internet.  My telemedicine work focused on the use of different modalities for medical diagnosis and medical interpretation.  My distance learning work involved linking schools in California, Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico to provide minority high school students information about health careers.  Prior to and concurrent with my telemedicine and distance learning research, I was a Project Officer managing multiyear, multimillion-dollar contracts under the Library’s Next Generation Internet and Scalable Information Infrastructure initiatives.  The projects I had involved a range of cutting-edge applications, including haptics (the sense of feel and touch) for robotic surgery and distant surgical education and the transmission of real-time three-dimensional video for emergency medical teleconsultations. (Diane Sonnenwald was working on one.)  Before participating in these initiatives, I managed a project in collaboration with the US State Department to connect the national medical libraries of newly independent states of the former Soviet Union to the internet, including those of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan.  In pre-internet times, I was one of the founders of NLM’s Learning Center for Interactive Technology, a center showcasing a range of interactive multimedia technologies for medical education.  I also developed multimedia applications.  When I started work at NLM, I conducted workshops on the design and use of contemporary technologies available at the time for medical education and worked on the interface and online help system for one of the world’s first online catalogs intended for search by end users. Prior to joining the Library, I was a professor at the Rutgers University Graduate School of Library Science.  During that time, I oversaw installation of a television studio within the school.  In addition to teaching and research, I consulted with the NLM, the US Army, the New Jersey Department of Education, the Coca Cola and Continental Telephone Companies, designing and evaluating education and training programs. Between the time I got my master’s degree and my doctorate, I worked for a year at the Southwest Regional Laboratory for Educational Research and Development working on elementary school curricula. In addition to teaching at Rutgers, I also taught courses at several universities at various stages of my working career, including Long Beach State University, Georgia State University, Catholic University, the George Washington University, and Marymount University. I have published over eighty articles and book chapters and one book.  I regularly review for the journals Telemedicine and eHealth, Educational Technology Research and Development, and Computers in Human Behavior. I occasionally review for the journals BMC Medical Education, BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, and Pediatrics. I earned my Baccalaureate and Master’s Degrees from Arizona State University and my Doctorate from Syracuse University.

We are grateful for Prof. Locatis for making himself available to our postgraduate students, for a very insightful and interesting lecture!