Laël Cranmer Gatewood papers

Laël Cramner Gatewood was born in Cleveland, Ohio and attended high school in Flint, Michigan. In 1959, Gatewood earned a B.A. in Divisional Science as Rockford College and was a Jane Addams scholar. Between 1959 and 1967, she worked as a research assistant in Biophysics and Biochemistry at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. This was the beginning of a long-term professional collaboration with Eugene Ackerman, Professor of Biophysics, who would later become director of the Division of Health Computer Sciences (DHCS) at the University of Minnesota. Gatewood completed an M.S. in Biophysics at the University of Minnesota in 1966. The next year, she left her position at Mayo Clinic to join Gene Ackerman when he accepted a faculty position at the University of Minnesota. She accepted a position as Research Fellow at the University’s School of Public Health Division of Biometry. Although Gatewood continued her collaboration with Ackerman, she also developed research projects in both cardiac epidemiology simulation and mathematical modeling. She also served as an advisor and technical writer for the Biomedical Data Processing Unit (BDPU) while earning a Ph.D. in in Biometry, completed in 1974. In 1974, the Division of Health Computer Sciences (DHCS) received one of the first grants from the National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) new Training in Health Computer Sciences grant program with the goal of developing instructors in health computing for academic health centers. The grant provided ten years of funding. When a new NLM training grant in 1984 provided an additional 25, DCHCS became the longest funded training programs with over 35 year of continuous funding. In July of 1979, Gatewood was appointed Director of the Division of Health Computer Sciences (DHCS), replacing Eugene Ackerman after his ten year tenure. By this time, DHCS had grown to six faculty members with appointments in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology and offered 21 courses in health computer sciences, including courses for medical residents and pharmacy students. In 1979, Gatewood and Ackerman published Mathematical Models in the Health Sciences: A Computer-Aided Approach, which accompanied an advanced course Mathematical Biology. They also worked together on population-based models of epidemic simulation, the National Micropopulation Simulation Resource. In addition to her work at the University of Minnesota, Gatewood served as health informatics consultant throughout her career and worked on several prominent epidemiological and clinical studies, including: • Robert Hiller, Minnesota state demographer, projecting Minnesota population statistics for the state’s 87 counties based on censuses records. • Oncologist B.J. Kennedy to calculate survival statistics for 200 stomach cancer surgery patients. • Alan Treloar, Professor of Biometry, for the Menstrual and Reproductive Rights Program. Gatewood worked as programmer and later project director of a longitudinal history database. • Cardiologist Ivan Frantz, as programmer and project director on Minnesota Coronary Survey • Glenn Bartsch, Professor of Biometry. Gatewood served as co-deputy director on the Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial, funded by the National Heart and Lung Institute and directed by Marcus Kjelsberg. Gatewood also worked with Frederick Goetz, Professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School and Director of General Clinical Research, writing a grant to obtain a CLINFO system, a clinical research database management system designed by the NIH National Center for Research Resources. The system allowed clinical investigators manage their own clinical research study data, files, statistics, and computer plots and graphs. The system was upgraded and merged into PROPHET, which added capabilities in bioinformatics for searching, merging, analyzing, and visualizing clinical data with the early genomic databases. In the 1980s, the DHCS developed a relationship with Minnesota Department of Public Health, establishing statewide registries for cancer and immunization – the Minnesota Cancer Surveillance System and the Minnesota Immunization Information Connection. Gatewood served as health informatics consultant for both projects. In 1984, Gatewood was inducted into the newly created American College of Medical Informatics. She also served as the organization’s first secretary. Gatewood also served on various committees and executive boards of the Society for Advanced Medical Systems and the Symposium for Computer Applications in Medical Care. In 1988, these two organizations merged with the American College of Medical Informatics to form the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). Gatewood held several leadership positions within AMIA throughout her career. In 1986, University Regents approved the establishment of the graduate program in Health Informatics. The program established ties to the MD/PhD program in 1987 and introduced elective “Computer Applications in Medicine and Medical Research” for medical students the next year. Gatewood also worked on health informatics projects internationally. In 1994, she was recruited to work on the World Health Organization Public Health Coordinating Center’s MONICA project in Helsinki, Finland. The Multinational MONItoring of Trends and Determinants in CArdiovascular Disease project monitored trends in cardiovascular diseases to relate risk factor changes in the population over a ten year period. In 1999, the University of Minnesota was invited to join the International Partnership in Health Informatics Education (IPHIE). IPHIE began in 1996, when the University of Amsterdam partnered with the medical informatics program in Heidelberg/Heilbronn, Germany. The goal of the project was to internationalize teaching program and emphasize collaboration and information sharing between programs. The program expanded over the years to include the University of Amsterdam, University of Heidelberg/ Fachhochschule Heilbronn, University of Utah, University for Health Informatics and Technology (UMIT), University of Washington, and Taipei Medical University, and each institution takes turns hosting the summer Master Class. The aim of this Master Class was to expose selected medical informatics students to an international academic environment. Other IPHIE activities include workshops on International Medical Informatics Congresses and active exchange of students and faculty among partner universities.

Gatewood stepped down as director of DHCS in May of 2000 and was replaced by Donald Connelly.

Sources: International Partnership for Health Informatics Education (2017). IPHIE. Retrieved from https://www.iphie.org/

Tobbell, D., & University of Minnesota. Institute for Health Informatics. (2015). Health informatics at Minnesota: The first fifty years. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Institute for Health Informatics.

University of Minnesota Academic Health Center Institute for Health Informatics (2018). Lael Gatewood, PhD, FACMI. Retrieved from https://healthinformatics.umn.edu/bio/ihi-faculty-staff/lael-gatewood