Board of Advisors

The Unified Code for Units of Measure has been founded in 1999 by Gunther Schadow then under the Supervision of Clement J. McDonald. For this reason, Gunther Schadow and Clem McDonald are ex-officio members of the Board of Advisors. Other members of the Board of Advisors have been recruited from a very small set of individuals who have over the years expressed interest and demonstrated expertise in the subject and have supported the UCUM project with their advice, advocacy, and expertise in the semantic domain of units of measures.

Roster

Dr. Simon Cox

Dr. Cox trained in geology and geophysics, starting his research career studying the mechanical properties of rocks in the laboratory. He is a leader in geospatial interoperability standards, including information modeling, data exchange standards, spatial data infrastructures, vocabularies and semantic web technologies. Dr. Cox is temporarily based in the Spatial Data Infrastructures Unit at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in northern Italy, working on harmonisation of several international geospatial initiatives. At CSIRO he most recently was project leader for Water Data Transfer Standards, and standards manager for AuScope GRID (National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy). Dr Cox was awarded the 2006 Gardels Medal by the Open Geospatial Consortium. Dr. Cox and the Open Geospatial Consortium had been very early supporters of UCUM and in fact the first formal adopters outside of the field of medicine.

Dr. Christof Gessner

Dr. Gessner has his Ph.D. in Physics/Chemistry? and academic training in Medical Physics and Medical Informatics. For many years, Dr. Gessner held positions in hospitals and with vendors of medical devices and software. Since 2008 he is an expert consultant for medical informatics standards and terminologies, including HL7, LOINC. Dr. Gessner has contributed to UCUM since early 2006. He is a member of the Medical Standards Committee of DIN (the german national standardization body) and a delegate to ISO TC 215. In 2010 he has been appointed by the DIN terminology comittee as a delegate to ISO TC 12, the international authority on units of measures.

Dr. Gunther Schadow (founder, chairman)

Dr. Schadow has created the intellectual foundation of the Unified Code for Units of Measure while working on his Ph.D. project in the interoperability of clinical laboratory results in 1996 at the Free University Berlin. In 1998 Dr. Schadow joined the Regenstrief Institute to work on Dr. McDonald's team where he refined the work on the units of measure terminology and eventually released the UCUM as a public specification. Dr. Schadow had been instrumental for the design and penetration of many of the newer HL7 version 3 specifications, both foundational standards, as the Reference Information Model (RIM) and HL7 data types specification, both of which have become ISO standards, as well as applied standards, such as the HL7 Structured Product Labeling (SPL) and Common Product Model, and more recently the HL7 Chemical Substances specification standard. These standards have revolutionized the way that drug knowledge is maintained and shared in the U.S.A., and have become a core part of ISO international standards on the identification of medicinal products. Dr. Schadow is a member of the IUPAC division VII sub-committe on Nomenclature of Properties and Units (NPU).

Dr. Daniel Vreeman (ex officio member, Regenstrief Institute liaison)

Dr. Vreeman is Assistant Research Professor at Indiana University School of Medicine and Regenstrief Institute Investigator. His research interests (in general) are centered on understanding and promoting effective organization, analysis, management, and use of information in healthcare. The principle focus areas are: (1) The use of standardized clinical vocabularies to support electronic health information exchange, and (2) Investigation of medical informatics applications to improve healthcare delivery and research. Dr. Vreeman's prominent role is in the management of the LOINC standard of universal codes for clinical observations and in general health informatics standards at Regenstrief.

NLM Liaison: Dr. Clement J. McDonald (founder)

Dr. McDonald is associated with the Board of Advisors as liaison to the National Library of Medicine (NLM). Dr. McDonald is a legend in medical informatics, one of the few pioneers of the field in the late 1960. He is the scientific "father" of the Regenstrief Institute where he has been relentlessly pushing an agenda of improving health care through information technology. He has built the largest and longest running electronic medical record system which is now serving the entire state of Indiana. To pursue these goals, Dr. McDonald had realized the need for medical information standards. He is the father of ASTM 1238, the first standard for communicating clinical and laboratory measurement results, and the clinical observation reporting and ordering components of HL7. Dr. McDonald also took on the challenge to create a terminology system for clinical observation results, the Logical Observation Identifiers, Names, and Codes (LOINC) while cooperating with other pioneers in this field world wide. Today Dr. McDonald is director of the Lister Hill Center of the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). Dr. McDonald is a member of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) division VII sub-committee for Nomenclature of Properties and Units (NPU) where he currently works with the world's experts on the second revised edition of the IUPAC "Silver Book", the authority in the field of metrology in medicine. Dr. McDonald has been a vital supporter of the work that led to the Unified Code for Units of Measure.