Stephane Meystre, MD, PhD

Overview

I am Stephane Meystre, a physician and medical informaticist. (Yes, my first name is spelled with an ‘e’ in the end, Stéphane, the French way, but not Stéphanie…)

My main interests and background include applications of “artificial intelligence” (AI, I know, it is a buzzword) and more specifically machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to support more effective clinical care and enable reuse of existing (unstructured and structured) clinical information for precision health and research applications, all while addressing responsible AI requirements (privacy-preserving, ethical, reproducible, explainable, efficient, secure, unbiased).

Professional background

I am currently Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Director of the new Institute of Digital Technologies for Personalised Healthcare (MeDiTech) at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI) in Lugano, Switzerland.

I have a medical background, with an MD from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and several years of clinical experience. My training in medical informatics includes a MS from the University of California, Davis and a PhD from the University of Utah, both in the United States.

After two years of healthcare IT experience in Switzerland, leading the design of a cancer research information system, I was Assistant Professor in Biomedical Informatics at the University of Utah (Salt Lake City, Utah, USA) where I focused my research on methods and resources to make clinical information easier to use for clinical practice and research, to enable clinical data reuse for clinical decision support and research, and on patient data privacy protection. In this domain, I developed a research team of post-doctoral fellows and graduate students, and established multiple interdisciplinary collaborations at the local, regional, national, and international levels. I also founded a startup company (Clinacuity) to develop commercial products from some of my research.

In 2016, I accepted an Associate Professor in Biomedical Informatics position at the Medical University of South Carolina and was awarded a SmartState endowed chair position in Translational Biomedical Informatics. My research efforts expanded on my initial focus to also build operational resources for the institution (e.g., research database of about 5 million patients with advanced search capabilities enabled by natural language processing (NLP) and text analytics), to help efficiently manage our local response to the COVID-19 pandemic, to automatically discover patients eligible for clinical trials, and to implement high-accuracy automatic clinical text de-identification services. I have been promoted to (full) Professor in the Biomedical Informatics Center, Public Health Sciences department and Psychiatry department at the Medical University of South Carolina (Charleston, South Carolina, USA) in 2020. I moved to the Netherlands in 2021 as Scientific Director for data science, AI and data platforms at the OnePlanet research center, a partnership between Radboud University and Radboudumc in Nijmegen, Wageningen University and Research, and imec, a nano-electronics and digital technology company in Eindhoven and Leuven (Belgium).

Publications (link)

Education

1992-1998	M.D. (Medical School, University of Lausanne, Switzerland)
2001-2002	M.S. (Medical Informatics, University of California, Davis, CA, USA)
2002-2005	Ph.D. (Medical Informatics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA)

Scholastic Honors

2020	Induction as Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association (FAMIA)
2020	Winner; AMIA Data Science Best Paper Award, AMIA Informatics Summit
2020	Election as Fellow of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (FIAHSI)
2016	Election as Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (FACMI)
2010	Winner, AMIA Distinguished Poster Award, AMIA Fall Symposium
2010	Winner, AMIA Distinguished Abstract Award, AMIA Summit for Clinical Research Informatics
2006	Nominated, Homer R. Warner Award, AMIA Fall Symposium
2006	Winner, AMIA Distinguished Paper Award, AMIA Fall Symposium
2003	Finalist, Student paper competition, AMIA Fall Symposium

Languages

French: fluent oral and written (level C2; mother tongue)

English: fluent oral and written (level C2)

Italian: good-proficient (level C1 oral, B2 written)

German: good (level B2 oral, B1 written)

Dutch: basic (level A1-A2)

Spanish: basic (level A1)