William A. Weems, Ph.D. is the Assictant Vice President of the Office of Academic Computing (OAC) for the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Associate Dean of the Medical School Office of Information Technology and Associate Professor of Integrative Biology, U.T. Medical School. Dr. Weems received his bachelor and master of science degrees from Baylor University and his Ph.D. in physiology from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the Department of Physiology at the Mayo Foundation in Rochester, Minnesota in 1976. That same year, he joined the Physiology Department faculty at the U.T. Houston Medical School. He has conducted extensive research in the areas of the neurophysiology of sympathetic ganglia, control of intestinal motility and fluid propulsion, and informatics as a tool for the study, modeling and management of complex systems.
Work with computational systems in biomedical research led to his realization that useful computational solutions suitable for biomedical applications require an integrated set of global information systems. This recognition has led to his involvement in the development of the Texas Medical Center open systems network, participation in electronic publishing and the integration of academic and health care information systems at the application layer.
During his tenure as OAC Director, the OAC has played a central role in the development of electronic publishing within both the University and the emerging global information infrastructure. The fully electronic publication of the American Physiological Society (APS), APStracts, was developed in collaboration with the APS and is currently distributed via the Internet by the OAC. The Multimedia Scriptorium of the OAC also facilities the creation, publication and facilitation of multimedia courseware and other scholarly works by faculty, students and staff of the University of Texas Houston. He is also currently the coordinator of the Phase I Implementation of the U. T. System Public Key Infrastructure (UTSPKI) and is a member of the PKI for Networked Higher Education working group of EDUCAUSE.
Dr. Weems is a recipient of a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Established Investigator Award and served four years as a permanent member of the NIH General Medicine A Study Section. For three years he was the associate editor of Physiological Reviews and has served on numerous editorial of boards of biomedical journals. He is a co-chairman of the U.T. Houston Information Resources Steering Committee, and a member of the U.T. System Information Technology Committee and the U. T. System Information Strategic Leadership Council. Professional societies to which he belongs include the American Physiological Society, the Society for Neuroscience, American Medical Informatics Association, Educause, and the Internet Society.