James J. Cimino is the Chief of Laboratory for Informatics Development at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health. He also holds an appointment as Senior Scientist at the Lister Hill Center National Center for Biomedical Communications at the National Library of Medicine.

He received a BS in biology, entitled "Computers in the Biomedical Sciences" from Brown University in 1977, an MD from New York Medical College in 1981, completed an internal medicine residency (with board certification) in 1984, and a medical informatics fellowship at Harvard Medical School in 1988. During his fellowship, he was primarily responsible for the development of a knowledge base for a medical diagnosis system (DXplain), contributed to the initial development of the National Library of Medicine's Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) and worked on terminology issues for DXplain and the Computer Stored Ambulatory Record (COSTAR).

In 1988, he began a dual appointment at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City, in the Department of Medicine and in the new Center for Medical Informatics (later, the Department of Medical Informatics, currently the Department of Biomedical Informatics). Initially an assistant professor, then associate professor, he became a full professor in both departments in 2002. At Columbia, he divided his time between patient care, teaching, research and development. He taught a variety of courses in the Department of Biomedical Informatics, directed the postdoctoral training program in informatics, and served as a clinical instructor in the Department of Medicine in the in-patient and out-patient residency services.

At Columbia, he was principal investigator on research projects involving controlled terminologies, clinical information systems, on-line decision support systems, and patient-oriented systems. He contributed to the development of the longitudinal clinical data repository that has been the basis for several clinical information systems at the Columbia university Medical Center and New York Presbyterian Hospital (including WebCIS, PatCIS and PalmCIS). In particular, he led the development of a knowledge-based controlled medical terminology called the Medical Entities Dictionary, which led to the formulation of a set of desiderata for controlled medical terminologies. He began studying clinician information needs which led to the development of automated, context-specific links between clinical systems and on-line information resources, including the Medline Button and Infobuttons. He subsequently developed an Infobutton Manager to automate the selection of these links using a knowledge base of clinician information needs.

He has been principal investigator on a National Information Infrastructure (NII) contract a National Heart Attack Alert Program and several Unified Medical Language System contracts (all from the National Library of Medicine), was co-principal investigator on a Digital Library Initiative grant from the National Science Foundation, and was principal investigator for ten years on a departmental training grant from the National Library of Medicine. Prior to leaving Columbia, he was principal investigator on three grants from the National Library of Medicine, related to controlled terminology and clinician information needs.

He has served on the scientific program committees of numerous national and international medical informatics meetings, including chairing the AMIA Annual Fall Symposium in 1996. He has over 280 publications, including 37 first-authored papers in peer-reviewed medical and medical informatics journals, as well as a leading textbook. He has been on the editorial board of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, is currently on the editorial boards of Methods of Information in Medicine, and is an associaet editor of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics.

He is a founding member of American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), where he has been elected to four terms on the Board of Directors (including Secretary). He was elected a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics in 1992, a Fellow of the American College of Physicians in 1998, a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine in 2006, and a Fellow of the American Clinical and Climatological Society in 2006.

In 2008, he moved to the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, where his is Chief of the Laboratory for Informatics Development, charged with the creation of the NIH-wide Biomedical Translational Research Information System (BTRIS). He also holds a Senior Scientist position at the National Library of Medicine's Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communication, where he carries out informatics research, including the development of the Librarian Infobutton Tailoring Environment (LITE), and directs the clinical informatics section of the NLM's postdoctoral training program. He holds an Adjunct Professor appointment in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University, where he continues to teach a graduate level informatics course and advises PhD students. He is also co-director (since 1999) of the NLM's Biomedical Informatics course, taught twice a year at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.