Eugene Ackerman papers

Eugene Ackerman was born in Brooklyn, NY July 8, 1920. He received a BA from Swarthmore College in 1941, ScM from Brown University in 1943, and a PhD in Biophysics from the University of Wisconsin in 1949. He was hired as an assistant professor of physics at Pennsylvania State University in 1951 and ultimately promoted to full professor. In 1960, Ackerman joined the department of Biophysics at the Mayo Graduate School of Medicine as an associate professor. He was promoted to full professor in 1965, and remained with the Mayo School of Medicine until 1967. In 1968, he was named professor of biomedical computing and biometrics in the College of Medical Science at the University of Minnesota. In 1968, he began serving as director of the Division of Health Computer Sciences, a position he held until 1978. In 1979, Dr. Ackerman was named director of the graduate program in Biophysical Science.

Dr. Ackerman also served as the editor of the Biophysical Journalfrom 1983-1987, and was active in many professional organizations, including the Association of Computing Machinary, the New York Academy of Science, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Sigma Xi, the American Physiological Society, the Biophysical Society, and was elected a fellow at the American Institute of Medical Informatics.

Considered a pioneer in the field of health informatics, Dr. Ackerman wrote one of the first and longest-funded grants in the nascent health computing field in the early 1960s. The project funded the core of the University's Biomedical Computing Facility, which in turned served researchers working on modeling projects in ultrasonic behavior of cells, enzyme kinetics, blood glucose regulation and patterns of infectious disease epidemics.

Dr,. Ackerman retired from the University of Minnesota, where he was honored as Professor Emeritus of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, in 1991. He died in October, 2014.