Dr. Houtan Aghili received his PhD in Computer, Information, and Control Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. He then joined IBM Alamden Research Center in 1981 where he worked on the understanding, design and development of fault tolerant systems. He then served as the Technical Staff to the Director of IBM Research in 1985-1986. In 1986 he joined IBM Watson Research Center, in which he managed and was the lead architect for several research projects, most notably a very large scale project with the Colorado Region of Kaiser Permanente, the largest HMO in the nation. This was a pioneering effort for the design and development of an electronic patient record system and medical infomatics (CIS). In 1999, the CIS system was selected as Kaiser’s national CIS solution to be deployed across all it regions. The system was demonstrated in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, was nominated by Computerworld and Smithsonian as one of the innovative products in 1997, has been included in the Permanent Research Collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, and received the Nicholas Davies Award from the Computerized Patient Record Institute in 1999.