Member Recognition and Chapter Excellence Awards

As Cornell University’s Vice President and Chief Global Information Officer, Dr. Curtis Cole is responsible for institutional digital strategy, policy, and technology capabilities across all campuses. His teams are focused on finding efficiencies and synergies across systems to benefit “One Cornell.” Dr. Cole is also the Frances and John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Libraries and Information Technology. He is an Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine and Population Health Sciences at Weill Cornell and practices Internal Medicine. He is also “Innovator in Residence” at Cornell Tech where he advises young technology companies.

After graduating medical school at Cornell (’94), he completed a residency in Primary Care Internal Medicine at the then New York Hospital (now New York Presbyterian). He then became a Clinical Investigator in Medical Informatics, also at the New York Hospital, where he helped implement their first Electronic Medical Record (EMR).

He joined the faculty at Weill Cornell as the first Director of Information Services and later became the Chief Medical Information Officer where he led the Epic Electronic Medical Record implementation until his promotion to CIO in 2009 and Assistant Vice Provost for Information Services in 2022. Dr. Cole was the co-Director of the Clinical Translational Science Center Bioinformatics Core for ten years. He has also worked to develop training programs in Healthcare Informatics and Healthcare Technology in the Graduate School. He has mentored dozens of masters’ students, medical students, as well as PhD and post-doctoral students.

His research has focused on payor-provider transactional efficiency, terminology services, using the semantic web for research networking, patient safety, and patient portals. His current work is focused on secondary use of clinical data, research informatics, and precision medicine.

Outside of Cornell, Dr. Cole is on the board of the Medicare Rights Center, a consumer service organization that works to ensure access to affordable health care for older adults and people with disabilities. He is also on the scientific advisory committee for Fountain House, a national mental health nonprofit that improves health and opportunity for people with serious mental illness.Dr. Cole has also served NYACP as a member of the Health and Public Policy Committee and Chair of the Health Information Technology Task Force.