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Medical School Faculty Spotlights

The distinguished faculty of St. Matthew's University is committed to providing students the best medical education focused on patient-centered care.
In addition to their responsibilities as educators, the faculty of St. Matthew's Medical School provides support to students as mentors. This ensures that each student has a dedicated resource committed to their success in achieving their Medical Doctor diploma.

Dean of Basic Sciences

R. Senthil Kumar M.D., F.C.C.P.
Associate Professor of Pharmacology and Clinical Therapeutics
M.D., Moscow Medical Stomatological Institute, Moscow
M.D., Sri Ramachandra Medical College and Research Institute, Chennai, India

Dr. Senthil Kumar completed his Medicine (M.D.) from Moscow and then obtained his M.D. in Pharmacology from India. Dr. Senthil Kumar had served as a Lecturer in the National University of Ireland Galway, where he taught Pharmacology for medical, nursing and postgraduate science students.

He has also conducted research in Neuropharmacology, specifically in areas of pain and anxiety. He has published his research work in highly reputed international journals including Nature and is currently involved in conducting research in the area of medical education.

He is a member of various major international professional associations including the American Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET), American College of Clinical Pharmacology (ACCP), International Association of Medical Sciences Education (IAMSE), Society for Neuroscience and American Pain Society (APS). He plays a very active role in the Pharmacology Education division of the ASPET. He has been a recipient of multiple awards for teaching excellence.

He is also actively involved in reviewing Pharmacology textbooks for major publishers including LWW and McGraw Hill and also reviews research articles for leading journals including Medical Education, Medical Teacher, and Teaching & Learning in Medicine.

Currently he is involved in teaching Medical Pharmacology I, Medical Pharmacology II, and Clinical Therapeutics courses.

Director of Research & Professor of Biostatistics Epidemiology & Evidence Based Medicine

Dr. Barry Robson Ph.D., D.Sc.

“It is a rare privilege to live at a time where research can embrace so many diverse scientific disciplines and yet also have the goal of helping physicians save lives.”

Scientific Background: Professor Barry Robson’s research might be well expected to cover a range of topics. In working his way through school as a psychiatric and surgical nurse, he developed an enduring interest in healthcare. He has over 220 publications (in Nature, Science, Journal of Molecular Biology, patents, etc.) following a Ph.D. in experimental biochemistry and a higher doctorate (D.Sc.) in computational chemical physics applied to biological molecules. He did post-doctoral work on proteins under Professor Roger Pain at the University of Newcastle, Professor Shneior Lifson at the Weizmann Institute, and Sir David Phillips at the University of Oxford, and under Sir Rodney Cotterill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_Cotterill at the Technical University of Denmark who extended Barry’s interests in artificial intelligence and consciousness. Dr. Robson vigorously defends the practical value of the latter kind of research. Robson developed the theory and algorithm of the GOR method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOR_method, which is widely used in bioinformatics. It not only entered an Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence but around 1999 made the top hundred most cited papers ever in the Journal of Molecular Biology… as number eleven! In addition Barry previously founded or help found several biopharmaceutical companies (at least one based on such thinking, which went on to the London Stock Exchange), serving as Chief Scientific Officer or equivalent, and as Chief Executive Officer of The Dirac Foundation to promote the work of physicist and Nobel Laureate Paul A. M. Dirac. From 1998 he served as Strategic Advisor at IBM Research world headquarters http://www.research.ibm.com/people/r/robson/ earning the industry title of IBM Distinguished Engineer for contributions to software technology, and subsequently becoming IBM’s Chief Scientific Officer, Global Healthcare and Life Sciences. He continued to advise IBM on healthcare and pharmaceutical strategy up to 2009, and on theories of innovation and technical vitality, contributing to “Innovate America”, a study by the panels of the National Innovation Initiative (published by The Council On Competitiveness, Washington DC. 2004).

Recent Work: Dr. Robson’s research has fallen into two areas of practical application. Up to 2000 it mainly involved the application of Expert Systems and computational chemistry for the analysis and design of peptide and protein structure [1] and of drugs to bind proteins, with success in the design of early HIV diagnostics, veterinary applications, and the Mad Cow Disease diagnostic marketed worldwide by Abbott. Though studies in protein science continue at St Matthew’s University [2], from 2000 Dr. Robson’s research focused on something very different: electronic patient records [3-7] and their data mining [8-10] for physician decision support systems for computer-assisted diagnosis, therapy selection, and risk and outcomes analysis [3]. It soon became possible to help start amassing enormous data sets generating quantitative rules for clinical inference and epidemiology [10], and for the biotechnology [11] and pharmaceutical [12,13] industries. The two areas of proteins and clinical records merged, however, in 2004, when the first of two papers on the Genomic Messaging System [14,15] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15473681 introduced a secure system for patient records including DNA which would amongst other things automatically help carry out drug design against proteins with features unique to that patient or group. The high level of interest was reflected in a press release from the American Chemical Society as a paper of special merit. Dr. Robson recently co-authored a ground breaking medical textbook entitled “The Engines of Hippocrates. From the Dawn of Medicine to Medical and Pharmaceutical Informatics.”

Research in Progress: Much of Dr. Robson’s current research seeks to lay the basis for advanced clinical decision support systems that are now the declared primary goal of Evidence Based Medicine, including the impact of genomic (DNA-based) and proteomic (protein-based) medical data. The developments help S. Matthew’s University assist the Cayman Heart Fund and other institutions of the Cayman Islands in monitoring public health, and support the University’s research into both psychological health and teaching methods, which along with anatomical research, are major themes at St Matthew’s. But for physicians, epidemiologists, and researchers, there is now an escalating need for artificially intelligent systems, software agents that roam the internet, analyze, and report back [17]. This is because the amount of medical data worldwide is escalating and already many billions of bytes more than anyone could download to analyze [3,17]. In 2007, therefore, Barry’s work took a curious turn suggesting that aspects of the mathematics of quantum mechanics should be explored for Best Practice in medical inference [16].

Mission and Practical Applications: But what is in it for physicians? According to the Human Rights Report on the United States, 2004, medical accidents are medicine’s third biggest killer below cardiovascular diseases (heart attack, stroke, etc.) and cancers. As much earlier recognized by epidemiologist Archie Chochrane who gave birth to the modern discipline of Evidence Based Medicine, misinformation and physician assumptions are extensively to blame. So, new legislations and guidelines, fear of litigation, the inefficiency of paper, and the FDA 2007 Amendment Act, are helping push physicians into use of advanced information technology. As Dr. Robson notes, it is a rare privilege to live at a time where research can embrace so many diverse scientific disciplines and yet also have the goal of helping physicians save lives.

1. [1] Robson, B. and Garnier, J. (1986) Introduction to Proteins and Protein Engineering (book), Elsevier Press, Amsterdam.
2. [2] Robson,B. and and A. Vaithilingham, A. (2008) “Protein Folding Revisited”, Progress in molecular Biology and Translational Science, Volume 84, Molecular Biology of Protein Folding, Part B., pp 3922–3947, AP, Elsevier
3. [3] Robson, B. and Baek, OK. (2009) The Engines of Hippocrates: From Medicine’s Early Dawn to Medical and Pharmaceutical Informatics (book) , John Wiley & Sons
4. [4] Shabo, A., Vortman P. and Robson B. (2001). “Who’s Afraid of Lifetime Electronic Medical Records?” proceedings of TEHRE – Towards Electronic Health Records Conference, London, UK, November 2001.
5. [5] Robson, B. and Garnier, J. (2002) “The future of highly personalized health care". Studies Health Technol. Inform. 80:163-74.
6. [6] Robson, B., and Baek, OK., “Personalized healthcare 2010: are you ready for information-based medicine?” B. Robson, OK Baek (2007) IBM Business Consulting Services
7. [7]. Svinte, M., Robson, B., and Henhenberger, M. (2007) “Biomarkers in Drug Dvelopment and Patient Care” Burrill 2007 Person. Med. ReportVol. 6, 3114 - 3126. 8.
8. [8]. Robson , B. (2003) “clinical and Pharmacogenomic Data Mining. 1. the generalized theory of expected information and application to the development of tools” J. Proteome Res. (Am. Chem. Soc.) 283-301, 2 (2003)
9. [9]. Robson, B. and Mushlin, R. (2004) “clinical and Pharmacogenomic Data Mining.. 2. A Simple Method for the Combination of Information from Associations and Multivariances to Facilitate Analysis, Decision and Design in Clinical Research and Practice”, J. Proteome Res. (Am. Chem. Soc.) 3(4); 697-711.
10. [10] Mullins, I.M., Siadaty, M.S., Lyman, J., Scully, K., Garrett, C.T., Miller, W. G., Muller, R., Robson, B., Apte, C., Weiss, S., Rigoustos, I., Platt, D., Cohen , S., Knaus, W. A. (2006) “ Data mining and clinical data repositories: Insights from a 667,000 patient data set” Computers in Biology and Medicine, 2006 Dec;36(12):1351-77.
11. [11] “The Dragon on the Gold: Myths and Realities for Data Mining in Biotechnology using Digital and Molecular Libraries”, B. Robson (2004) J. Proteome Res. (Am. Chem. Soc.) 3 (6), 1113 - 9.
12. [12] Robson, B., and Vaithinlingam, A. (2009) “Myths and Realities in Pharmaceutical Data Mining” B. Robson and A. Vaithilingam (2009), in: Technologies for the Pharmaceutical Industry, John Wiley and Sons, in press
13. [13] Li, J. Robson, B., Dettinger, R., Peters,A. and Boyer, S. (2009) “Drug Design by Data Mining Patents, Annotating and Federalizing Ligand and Protein Target Data, and Virtual Screening on a Supercomputer”, submitted.
14. [14] Robson, B. and Mushlin, R. (2004) “Genomic Messaging System for Information-Based Personalized Medicine with Clinical and Proteome Research Applications”, J. Proteome Res. (Am. Chem. Soc.) 3(5); 930-948.
15. [15] Robson, B. and Mushlin, R. (2005) “The Genomic Messaging System Language Including Command Extensions for Clinical Data Categories” B. Robson and R. Mushlin J. Proteome Res. (Am. Chem. Soc.) 4 (2), 275 -299
16. [16] Robson, B., “The New Physician as Unwitting Quantum Mechanic: Is Adapting Dirac’s Inference System Best Practice for Personalized Medicine, Genomics and Proteomics?” B. Robson (2007), J. Proteome Res., Vol. 6, No. 8: pp 3114 – 3126
17. [17] Robson, B. (2009) “Towards Intelligent Internet-Roaming Agents for Mining and Inference from Medical Data” in “Strategy for the Future”, Future of Health Technology Vol. III, Ed. Renata Bushko, IOS Press, in press