Dr. Patricia Brennan named 2025 Glaser Award Recipient

One decade ago, in 2015, The John P. Glaser Health Informatics Society (Glaser Society) was initiated by McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics at UTHealth Houston in recognition of the expertise and leadership of John P. Glaser, PhD, who is a universally recognized thought leader in the field of health informatics. The Glaser Society was created to acknowledge outstanding innovators in the field of health informatics through the John P. Glaser Health Informatics Innovator Award. The attendant annual Glaser Society Proceedings and related events provide education, collaboration, and networking opportunities for the broader community of health informatics professionals, clinicians, and students.

This year, we will honor Patricia Flatley Brennan, RN, PhD as she receives the 2025 John P. Glaser Health Informatics Innovator Award. Dr. Brennan will be formally inducted into the Glaser Society by its Founding Member, John P. Glaser, PhD, and Jiajie Zhang, PhD, McWilliams Dean and Professor. Immediately after the induction ceremony, we will host an open forum discussion with Dr. Brennan, followed by a reception.

This year’s Glaser Society Proceedings will take place on Friday, November 7. For details on the event, please visit our Glaser Society webpage.

Dr. Brennan is currently Emerita Professor at the School of Nursing and College of Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison. For the academic year 2024-2025, Dr. Brennan served as the University of Pennsylvania Provost Distinguished Visiting Faculty Fellow.

From 2016-2023 Dr. Brennan served as the director of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). NLM is a leader in biomedical informatics and computational health data science research and the world’s largest biomedical library. Brennan’s leadership positioned it as a global scientific research library with visible and accessible pathways to research and information that is universally actionable, meaningful, understandable, and useful. This ensures that scientists, policymakers, clinicians, patients, and the public can access biomedical information when and where they need it.

While at NIH, Dr. Brennan co-led the development of Digital NIH, the NIH’s first long-range vision of the data platforms and information technology needed to support the NIH mission.  She worked with NIH leadership to create a more robust and responsive IT governance and funding strategy. Additionally, Dr Brennan served on the National Science and Technology Committee’s Machine Learning and AI Subcommittee, a cross governmental body established to advise OSTP on AI Investments. 

Dr. Brennan is a nurse and an industrial engineer, holding a Master of Science in Nursing from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in Industrial Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  In her 30-year academic career path she devised innovated technological strategies to support patient self-management at home. Recognized for her work designing and evaluating home-based technologies for self-care, Brennan led Federally-funded research projects including ComputerLink (1988-1995); HeartCare (1996-2004) and vizHOME. As a lead investigator in the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, Brennan developed the Living Environments Laboratory, an immersive virtual reality CAVE to explore innovations in home care.  She continued this work while serving as an Adjunct Investigator in the Advanced Visualization Branch within the NINR Division of Intramural Research. Dr. Brennan is a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing and the American College of Medical Informatics and is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine.

Previous Glaser Award Recipients

In 2016, Ivo D. Nelson, a notable health information technology entrepreneur, was accorded the first John P. Glaser Health Informatics Innovator Award (Glaser Award); Dr. David Westfall Bates, Harvard’s internationally renowned patient safety expert, was presented the Glaser Award in 2017; H. Stephen Lieber, former President & CEO of the Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), received the 2018 Glaser Award; Grahame Grieve, Founder of HL7 FHIR and FHIR Product Director at HL7 International, accepted the 2019 Glaser Award; after a two-year hiatus due to the pandemic, Dr. Clement “Clem” J. McDonald, Chief Health Data Standards Officer of the National Institutes of Health National Library of Medicine, was given the 2022 Glaser Award; and Dr. Marion Jokl Ball, an extraordinary proponent of health informatics and technologies that ameliorate health and healthcare, received the 2023 Glaser Award. In 2024, Judy Faulkner, Founder and CEO of Epic and one of the early developers and champions of electronic medical records, received the 2024 John P. Glaser Health Informatics Innovator Award.