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Rachel Richesson, PhD, MS, MPH, is a Professor in the Department of Learning Health Sciences, School of Medicine, University of Michigan. She holds a PhD and MS in Health Informatics and a Master of Public Health from the University of Texas.  

Dr. Richesson conducts original research on the quality and usability of data from EHRs for research and has fostered numerous interdisciplinary research collaborations.  She has directed implementation of data standards for a number of multi-national multi-site clinical research and epidemiological studies, including the NIH Rare Diseases Clinical Research Network, Type 1 Diabetes TrialNet, The Environmental Determinants of Diabetes in the Young study, and the national distributed Patient Centered Outcomes Research Network. Dr. Richesson currently co-leads the EHR Core for the NIH Health Systems Research Collaboratory, which is developing standards and quality metrics for clinical phenotyping using EHR data in pragmatic clinical trials.  

Dr. Richesson’s research interests include evaluating and implementing data standards (including terminologies and classifications such as SNOMED CT, ICD, LOINC, RxNorm, CTCAE and MedDRA, and condition-specific "common data elements"), knowledge representation (including formal ontologies and heterogeneous data integration), the design of patient registries, and rare diseases research advocacy.  Dr. Richesson was elected as a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics in 2014. She was elected to serve on the AMIA Board of Directors in 2021. She is the Editor of the Springer Clinical Informatics textbook: https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319987781 and is currently preparing the 3^rd edition.