Blackford Middleton, PCCDS Learning Network Steering Committee Chair and senior research team member, is Chief of Informatics and Innovation at Apervita, Inc., and Past-Chair of the Board of Directors of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), and the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS), and Instructor in the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health in the Departments of Health Policy and Management, and Policy Translation and Leadership Development. Previously, he was a professor of Biomedical Informatics, and or of Medicine, at Stanford, Harvard, and Vanderbilt Universities, and he held executive leadership roles at MedicaLogic/ Medscape, Partners Healthcare System, and at Vanderbilt. Dr. Middleton’s work is focused on clinical informatics – the applied science surrounding strategy, design, implementation, and evaluation of clinical information systems in complex environments. Dr. Middleton is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, the American College of Medical Informatics, and of HIMSS. Dr. Middleton studied Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He received a Master’s in Public Health degree from the Yale University School of Public Health with a dual concentration in Chronic Disease Epidemiology, and Health Services Administration. He received an MD from SUNY Buffalo, and was a resident in internal medicine at the University of Connecticut Health Sciences Center. He completed an AHCPR Fellowship in General Internal Medicine at Stanford University, where he received his Master of Science degree in Health Services Research, focusing on clinical informatics.