George Demiris, PhD, FACMI
Mary Alice Bennett University Professor
Dr. Demiris is the Mary Alice Bennett University Professor in the School of Nursing and Perelman School of Medicine, and Associate Dean for Research and Innovation in the School of Nursing.
Dr. Demiris explores innovative ways to utilize technology and support patients and their families in various settings, including home and hospice care. He also focuses on designing and evaluating personal health systems that produce patient-generated data including “smart home” solutions for aging, and on understanding the potential of wearable devices or digitally augmented residential settings to support independence and quality of life for community-dwelling older adults. Dr. Demiris’s research provides evidence-based recommendations about how to design systems that older adults can easily adopt and integrate in their lives. He has examined the challenges of privacy and obtrusiveness in the context of technology use, and he has comprehensively examined technical, ethical and practical challenges associated with the use of technology to support aging and consumer informatics tools.
He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Medicine, a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, the Gerontological Society of America and the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics. He has conducted numerous federally funded studies and his work has been funded consistently over the years both by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). He is the Director of the Penn Artificial Intelligence Collaboratory for Healthy Aging (PennAITech) and Co-Director of the Penn Community Collaboratory for Co-Creation (Penn4C).
Dr. Demiris holds joint faculty appointments in the Informatics Division of the DBEI and in the Department of Biobehavioral Health Sciences of the School of Nursing. A native of Greece, he earned a PhD in health informatics from the University of Minnesota, following undergraduate and graduate degrees in medical informatics from the University of Heidelberg.