In Memoriam
This page is dedicated to fond remembrance of members of the UW BIME family who are no longer with us.
Charles (Chuck) W. Dohner, PhD
Chuck was a pioneer in medical education, and was founding Chairman of the UW Department of Medical Education. As a pioneer and innovator in medical education evaluation, program development and mentorship, Chuck was instrumental in developing educators in academic medicine, simulations and performance assessment, and in community-based medical education. In his leadership role at the UW, he helped create and evaluate the WWAMI program, the regional medical education program for the states of Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho.
He began his career as a high school and junior college teacher in Kansas where he taught mathematics and served as the basketball coach from 1953 to 1957. From 1957 to 1963, he was dean of men at Seattle Pacific University in Seattle. At age 35, he became a graduate student in education at The Ohio State University and also served as associate director of the university testing center, where he assisted several medical school faculty members with educational evaluation and research.
Chuck completed his PhD and was recruited by the UW in 1967 to establish an office of research in medical education, which became a department in the School of Medicine in 1989. After he stepped down as chairman in 1996, he continued to work with the Teaching Scholars Program and the International Medical Education Program. He was the founding president of the Society of Directors of Research in Medical Education and a frequent consultant in international medical education. He passed away in June, 2010.
Ira J. Kalet, PhD, FACMI
Ira was awarded a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Princeton University in 1969 and embarked on a teaching career. He then joined the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of Washington in 1978, beginning a long academic career in medical physics, establishing a research effort in medical informatics, publishing a book on the principals of biomedical informatics, and mentoring several students.
He maintained joint appointments in Medical Education and Biomedical Informatics, Computer Science and Engineering, and Bioengineering and was an informatics contributor for more than 25 years, having received a best paper award at the 1985 Congress of the American Association for Medical Systems and Informatics (AAMSI). He led the development of the University of Washington MS and PhD programs in Biomedical and Health Informatics (BHI) and served until 2004 as the Director of the UW BHI Graduate Program. Ira was very engaged with various UW departments, advising a number of graduate students, and held joint or adjunct appointments with several departments before his retirement from the UW. He passed away in February 2015 after a long battle with cancer.
Lynn S. Mandel, PhD
Lynn received her PhD in Medical Education from the University of Washington in 1983 and immediately received an appointment in the Department of Medical Education at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Her early research was in the methodologies of teaching CPR and retention of CPR skills. As an educator in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, she was passionate about improving the training and surgical skills of resident physicians. She worked with Dr. Barbara Goff on a landmark work which describes a symptom index for the early diagnosis of ovarian cancer. She published over 42 articles in medical journals and gave many presentations on her work to national and international audiences.
Lynn brought energy and wisdom to every facet of her life, including her career in Medical Education. She passed away in 2007.
Fredric Wolf, PhD, FACMI
Fred had a long and illustrious history in both medical education and biomedical informatics. Fred’s academic career began at Ohio State University in 1980. In 1982, he moved to the University of Michigan where he directed the instructional computing facility at the medical school and later created the Laboratory for Computing, Cognition, and Clinical Skills. As an educational researcher, he did pioneering psychometric work on the validity of patient management problems as a clinical reasoning assessment technique. His work helped establish the use of “efficiency” measures rather than “proficiency” measures as the basis for scoring performance.
In 1997, Fred moved from Michigan to the University of Washington, as chair of the Department of Medical Education, which later became the Department of Medical Education and Biomedical Informatics. In Seattle, working with Sherri Fuller, Peter Tarczy-Hornoch, Ira Kalet and others, Fred played a critical role in fostering academic Biomedical and Health Informatics at the University of Washington, guiding the department to become a nationally prominent center for research and training. After 13 years as Department Chair, Fred stepped down in 2012 to focus on his own research and teaching which included two very popular courses on evidence based medicine, systematic reviews and meta-analysis. He passed away in July 2017 after a long, heroic battle against a rare cancer. In 2018 BIME established the Fred Wolf Mentorship Award in Fred’s honor.