The scientific conscience of The Meridian

Dari Alhuwail is Associate Professor in the Department of Information Science at Kuwait University and a health-informatics consultant at the Dasman Diabetes Institute. His research spans digital health, data security, and public-health quality improvement, and he serves as IMIA Vice-President for the Middle East and North Africa. He brings to The Meridian the international reach and systems-level view of data integrity the journal deliberately sought among its founders.

Ana Beduschi is Professor of Law at the University of Exeter and a member of its Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, working at the frontier of AI governance, human rights, and data protection. Her Geneva Academy brief on human rights and the governance of AI is a widely used reference. She brings to The Meridian a perspective few biomedical journals hold: the legal and ethical guardrails that responsible AI in health must satisfy.

Taridzo Chomutare is a senior researcher at the Norwegian Centre for E-health Research in Tromsø, with a secondary appointment at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway. He works on clinical natural language processing, automated diagnosis coding, and federated health-data networks, and led a rare randomised trial evaluating AI-assisted clinical coding in practice. He brings to The Meridian a commitment to evidence over hype — testing health-AI tools in the real world rather than assuming they work.

Mowafa Househ is Professor of health informatics in the College of Science and Engineering at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha. A prolific scholar and a leading force building health informatics across the Arab world, his work spans consumer health, mobile and social technologies, and AI, and earned him the United Nations AI4Development Award. He brings to The Meridian genuine global breadth and a conviction that digital health must serve patients and the public directly.

Zerina Lokmic-Tomkins is Associate Professor in the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Monash University, internationally recognised for advancing climate adaptation and resilience in maternal and child health. She brings planetary health into informatics in concrete ways — including how disaster and climate concepts are represented in clinical terminologies such as SNOMED CT — and into how the next generation of clinicians is taught. She brings to The Meridian a forward-looking view of sustainability and the environmental dimensions of health that most journals overlook.

Farah Magrabi is Professor of Biomedical and Health Informatics at the Australian Institute of Health Innovation, Macquarie University, where she leads research on the safety and evaluation of AI and digital-health systems. Her work has shaped international practice, including the ISO/TS 20405 standard for surveillance of digital-health safety events. She anchors for The Meridian a principle central to the journal: that clinical AI must be rigorously tested and governed before it ever reaches patient care.

Alvin B. Marcelo is a surgeon and Clinical Professor of Health Informatics in the Medical Informatics Unit at the University of the Philippines Manila. A founding leader and first chair of the Asia eHealth Information Network, he has shaped health-information interoperability and digital-health governance across Asia and the Pacific, and was an inaugural Fellow of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics. He brings to The Meridian a systems-level view of integrity and the connective tissue that lets health systems work together.

Martin Michalowski is a School of Nursing Foundation Research Professor at the University of Minnesota. A computer scientist who became a leader in nursing AI, his signature work is explainable clinical decision support and AI for patients with multiple chronic conditions; he co-directs the Center for Nursing Informatics and the NAIL Collaborative and co-presides over the AIME Society. He brings to The Meridian the standards of the mainstream AI community, carried directly into clinical care.

Gojiro Nakagami is Professor in the Department of Gerontological Nursing and Wound Care Management at the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Medicine. He pioneered “wound blotting” for biofilm detection, now cited worldwide, and works at the meeting point of molecular biology, sensing, AI, and bedside nursing. He brings to The Meridian a rare ability to connect laboratory science, engineering, and direct patient care.

Sascha Ott is Professor at Warwick Medical School and Director of the University of Warwick's Bioinformatics and Digital Health Services, a platform his team grew to serve well over a hundred research groups. His research spans gene-regulatory networks, genomic surveillance, and the computational methods that clinical studies depend on, and he sits on the ELIXIR-UK steering committee. He brings to The Meridian deep computational rigour and a builder's instinct for the infrastructure that makes trustworthy health data possible.

Desmond Upton Patton is a Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with appointments spanning social policy, communication, and psychiatry. He pioneered the Contextual Analysis of Social Media (CASM) method, bringing culture and human context into how AI reads language, and is a leading scholar on social media, youth, and community wellbeing. He brings to The Meridian a vital and often-missing voice: the social context, equity, and ethics of health AI.

Lisiane Pruinelli is Associate Professor of Biobehavioral Nursing Science at the University of Florida College of Nursing, with a joint appointment in the Department of Surgery. She pairs a decade of transplant-coordination experience with machine learning on complex clinical data — transplantation, sepsis, and chronic disease — and leads NIH-funded work as an American Academy of Nursing Fellow. She brings to The Meridian clinical credibility fused with data-science depth: a reviewer who has lived both sides of the data.

Charlene Ronquillo is Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, where she founded the Health Informatics Equity Lab. Her work asks who benefits from health technology and who is left out, using participatory design to keep equity at the centre of digital health; she is a NAIL Collaborative leader and a Digital Health Canada Women Leaders awardee. She brings to The Meridian a conscience for equity and the human context of informatics.

Jiyoun Song is Assistant Professor of Biobehavioral Health Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. Her research elevates nurse-generated data — using natural language processing and machine learning to pull signal from clinical notes that structured records miss — most recently applying large language models to detect infection indicators in home health care. She brings to The Meridian rigour in clinical data science and a commitment to making the everyday knowledge of frontline clinicians count as evidence.

Gregor Štiglic is Professor of AI in Healthcare at the University of Maribor's Faculty of Health Sciences and an Honorary Fellow of the Usher Institute in Edinburgh. His research advances machine learning and explainable AI for clinical prediction, and as an associate editor of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine he has long helped steward peer review in the field. He brings to The Meridian hands-on editorial judgment and a demand that clinical machine learning be interpretable, not just accurate.

Hanna Suominen is Professor of Computing at the Australian National University, with continuing ties to the University of Turku. A leader in clinical language technologies, she has spent her career turning messy clinical text into something trustworthy, and long co-organised the international CLEF eHealth evaluation labs that set shared benchmarks for the field. She brings to The Meridian authority on natural language processing, rigorous evaluation, and the community-building spirit of open, comparable science.