Dr A. Abu-Hanna (1963) has been named professor of Medical Informatics at the University of Amsterdam’s Faculty of Medicine (AMC-UvA).

Ameen Abu-Hanna sees great potential for medical informatics to improve the quality of health care, and would like to see the AMC-UvA’s Medical Informatics Department play a more prominent role in this respect at both the national and international level. His research focuses on two themes. The first theme centres on learning predictive models from complex medical data. These models can play an important role in safeguarding the quality of health care and facilitating difficult clinical decision making. The second theme centres on designing guideline-based decision support systems and measuring their effect on the behaviour of healthcare professionals and patient outcomes. As regards education, Abu-Hanna aims to contribute to a plan for the training/re-training of medical students and other healthcare professionals in the area of medical informatics.

Abu-Hanna has held various positions at the AMC-UvA since 1997. He served as vice-president of the Medical Informatics Educational Institute (1997-2000), associate professor (from 2000), and (adjunct) Head of the Medical Informatics Department (2003 and from 2010 onwards). Prior to this time, he worked at Utrecht University and the University of Amsterdam, where he obtained his doctorate degree in Artificial Intelligence in 1994. Abu-Hanna served as visiting professor at Stanford University in 2002, and was president of the European Society of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine from 2007 to 2009. Abu-Hanna received a 1 million euro grant for the ICOVE project as a part of the ZonMW National Care for the Elderly Programme. He is associate editor of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics and has published extensively in medical informatics and clinical journals.