Ulysses G.J. Balis, M.D. Associate Professor and Director, Division of Pathology Informatics Campus Address: M4233 Med Sci I 1301 Catherine Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-0602 Phone: 734/615-5727 Fax: 603/250-3139 ulysses@umich.edu

Clinical Interests:

Patient safety improvements in the clinical laboratory, automation and real-time specimen tracking, whole-slide microscope and telepathology, digital imaging solutions for surgical pathology.

Research Interests:

Numerical analysis and interpretation of digital histological (whole-slide) data sets in tandem with expression data and other high-order data, Vector Quantization (VQ) tools and Gallois Fields, design of support vector engines for automated region-of-interest based image repository query.

Brief Biography:

Dr. Balis received dual B.S. degrees in Computer Engineering and Biology from Duke University in 1987. He attended medical school at the University of South Florida and was awarded an M.D. in 1991. He completed residency training in Anatomic and Clinical Pathology at the University of Utah during the period 1991-1996, followed by postdoctoral fellowship training under the Whitaker Foundation B.E.R.E. Program at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard University Health Sciences and Technology Program (1996-1998), with continued research in tissue engineering at Harvard's Center for Engineering in Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital during the period 1996-2000. Dr. Balis is the recipient of several awards including the Lansky Award from the College of American Pathologists (2000) for his efforts with establishing a DICOM image object descriptor (IOD) for use with digital microscopy; Award for best ultrastructural abstract from the Society for Ultrastructural Pathology at the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology Annual Meeting (2003) and the award for best Scientific Session on Imaging Informatics (http://apiii.upmc.edu/abstracts/display.cfm?id=294) at the 2004 APIII meeting. He has presented a number of Keynote Presentations including the Australian Pathology Information Technology World Symposium (2003); Pathology Update Meeting, Australian Royal College (2005) and Current Update in Telepathology, Provincial Laboratory Coordinating Office, British Columbia, Canada (2005).

Dr. Balis was the Founding Medical Director of the Core Instrumentation and Image Processing Laboratory for Associated Regional and University Pathologists, Inc. (ARUP), and served as Director from 1992-1996. He also served as Assistant Medical Director for the Flow Cytometry Clinical Laboratory for ARUP from 1993-1996. In 2000, Dr. Balis joined the faculty of the Department of Pathology at Harvard Medical School as an Instructor, and was promoted to the rank of Assistant Professor in 2002. He served as Chief of Pathology and Laboratory Services at Shriners Hospital for Children, Boston Burns Unit (2000-2006), and was the Director of Pathology Informatics at Massachusetts General Hospital from 2000-2006. He also served as Acting Chief Information Officer, at Shriners Hospital from 2004-2005.

Dr. Balis is a member of numerous professional societies including the Association for Pathology Informatics of which he was a founding member, served as Vice-President and is currently President-Elect. While at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), he developed and implemented a barcode tracking system for Anatomic Pathology Workflow. This patent is held by MGH. Dr. Balis has numerous publications in peer reviewed journals and has served as an invited speaker nationally and internationally in the area of informatics.

In 2006, Dr. Balis joined the faculty of the Department of Pathology as Associate Professor and Director of Clinical Informatics in the Division of Pathology Informatics.