The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has announced the appointment of Betsy L. Humphreys as NLM's Acting Director, effective April 1, 2015, following the retirement of Dr. Donald A.B. Lindberg.
NLM is one of the 27 Institutes and Centers that comprise the National Institutes of Health. Humphreys has served as NLM's deputy director since 2005, sharing responsibility with the Director for overall program development, program evaluation, policy formulation, direction and coordination of all Library activities. As Deputy Director of the Library, Humphreys also coordinated NLM's extensive activities related to health data standards, serving as US Member and founding Chair of the General Assembly of the International Health Terminology Standards Organisation. She has contributed to the development of NIH and HHS policy on a range of matters, including health information technology, public access to research results, clinical trial registration and results reporting.
Humphreys, who joined the NLM in 1973, previously led the NLM's Library Operations Division and directed the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) project, which produces knowledge sources to support advanced processing, retrieval, and integration of information from disparate electronic information sources.
Humphreys is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, and a Fellow of the Medical Library Association. She is the recipient of a number of awards, including the Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence from the American College of Medical Informatics, considered the highest honour in the field of medical informatics, the Marcia C. Noyes Award, which is the Medical Library Association's highest honour, and the first Cornerstone Award conferred by the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries.
