Paul A. Law, M.D., M.P.H.

Kennedy Krieger Institute
707 N. Broadway
Baltimore, MD 21205
Phone: (443) 923-4140
Email: lawp@kennedykrieger.org

Dr. Paul Law is the director of medical informatics at the Kennedy Krieger Institute, as well as the principal investigator overseeing the development of the Interactive Autism Network (IAN). He is an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the Department of Pediatrics.

Biographical Sketch:

Dr. Law earned his medical degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1997, and received a master's of public health degree from the JHU School of Public Health in the year prior. He completed his pediatric residency in 2000, and a health informatics fellowship in 2005 -- both at Johns Hopkins.

Dr. Law has extensive experience in the design and implementation of health research studies in autism and international health. In 1996, he began a collaborative project with the Cure Autism Now Foundation to develop the Internet System for Assessing Autistic Children (ISAAC). Currently, ISAAC is being used by projects at the CDC, NIH, and academic institutions (both domestically and internationally).

He joined Kennedy Krieger in 2005 to lead a project to develop the Interactive Autism Network (IAN), a new national autism database and to support other researchers at the institute through the discipline of health research informatics.

As a consultant to the World Health Organization, Dr. Law is working on an initiative to develop an international on-line community of child health researchers in developing countries. His international work has taken him to India, Bangladesh, Egypt and Haiti.

Dr. Law is a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Informatics Association and Delta Omega, the Honorary Society in Public Health.

Research Summary:

Current statistics predict one out of every 110 children is destined to develop autism -- and that rate is rising every year. Autism is an incapacitating, lifelong developmental disability that typically appears within the first three years of life and is the result of a neurological disorder that affects the functioning of the brain.

Dr. Law is the principal investigator overseeing the development of the Interactive Autism Network (IAN), a national online autism database that will serve as a shared resource to centralize registration of families and individuals with autism spectrum disorders and connect them with researchers, parents and other individuals with autism throughout the country and the world. In addition to supporting scientific investigation, it will provide individuals and families affected by autism with unprecedented information about the experiences of others and serve as an open resource for educators and policy makers. A longitudinal database will enable families and individuals to participate in an online study aimed at understanding the patterns of treatment use and responses to those treatments. Read Baltimore Sun article on Dr. Law and IAN (March 16, 2008).

Dr. Law’s other projects include the development of a national registry and longitudinal study of HIV patients in Ethiopia, as well as a comprehensive public health information system for a project that serves 20 million people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

LINK: SciVal Experts Research Profile for Paul Law