Neil Sarkar, PhD, MLIS, FACMI is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Rhode Island Quality Institute (RIQI), which serves as Rhode Island’s Regional Health Information Organization. He is also an Associate Professor of Medical Science and Associate Professor of Health Services, Policy & Practice at Brown University. Prior to his current role at RIQI, he was the founding director of the Brown Center for Biomedical Informatics. The underlying hypothesis in Dr. Sarkar’s research is that the integration of unlinked data leads to new information that can be used to inform knowledge about underpinning phenomena in biology and health. Dr. Sarkar’s work has been funded by sources such as the National Science Foundation, the Ellison Medical Foundation, the Medical Library Association, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the US Department of Veterans Affairs, and the National Institutes of Health. He is an elected Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, a member of the Board of Directors of the American Medical Informatics Association, and the Founding Editor-and-Chief of JAMIA Open. He has been an author on over 125 peer-reviewed articles, which span topics from comparative genomics using phylogenetic approaches to population level trend detection and predictive modeling in clinical and public health contexts, as well as the editor of a textbook (Methods in Biomedical Informatics: A Pragmatic Approach).