David A. Damassa

Dave Damassa is Dean for Information Technology at the Tufts University School of Medicine. He became the school's first information technology (IT) director in 1997 and has been responsible for fostering the development and integration of IT services and policies within the school, on the health sciences campus, and across the University. Working collaboratively with the Hirsh Health Sciences Library and the five health sciences schools, he oversees the Tufts University Science Knowledgebase (TUSK), a multimedia knowledge management system built on Open Source software and currently used by medical schools in the US, Africa and India. He has helped lead University-wide strategic planning initiatives for both academic and administrative computing. He is a member of the Steering Committee for the AAMC's Group on Information Resources (GIR) and a faculty member for the GIR Summer Leadership Institute.

Dave has actively promoted the use of IT to support medical education and research for more than two decades. He received his Ph.D. in Physiology, with a minor in Anatomy, from Stanford in 1977 and did postdoctoral work at the UCLA Brain Research Institute. He was co-director of the Reproductive Research Center at Tufts and has been a member of several NIH study sections and federal advisory groups. Dave is a Professor of Anatomy and Cellular Biology and participates in the teaching of Clinical Anatomy and Health Information Systems courses. Together with the TUSK team, he is currently working on projects funded by the National Library of Medicine and the Hewlett Foundation to develop standards-based tools that facilitate the global sharing and use of resources for medical education.

• Cates, J.M., Damassa, D.A., Gagin, G.A., and Dempsey, R.V. Hepatic expression of sex hormone-blinding globulin associated with the post-natal surge of serum androgen-binding activity in the Djungarian hamster. J.Steroid Biochem. & Mol. Biol., 55:147-158, 1995.
• Soto, A.M., Lin, T-M, Sakabe, K., Olea, N., Damassa, D.A., and Sonnenschein, C. Variants of the human prostate LNCaP cell line as tools to study discrete components of the androgen-mediated proliferative response. Oncology Res. 7:545-558, 1995.
• Damassa, D.A., Gagin, G.A., and Gustafson, A.W. Purification and characterization of the sex hormone-binding globulin in serum from Djungarian hamsters. Comp. Biochem. Physiolo. 113B:593-599, 1996.
• Cates, J.M. and Damassa, D.A. Characterization and developmental expression patterns of testicular androgen-binding protein in the Djungarian hamster (Phodopus sungorus). J. Reprod. Fertil. 111:291-298, 1997.
• Damassa, D.A., El-Bermani, W., Rufo, M. and Willson, R.F. Computerized Cross-Sectional Imaging in the Study of Human Anatomy. In: computer Enhanced Learning: Vignettes of Best Practice from American's Most wired Campuses, Anker Publishing Co., Boston, 1999.
• Rubin, B.S., Murray, M.K., Damassa, D.A., King, J.C., Soto, A.M., Perinatal exposure to low doses of bisphenol-A affects body weight, patterns of estrous cyclicity and plasma LH levels. Environmental Health Perspectives, 109:675-680, 2001.
• Mary Y. Lee, Susan Albright, Tarik Alkasab, David Damassa, Paul Wang, Elizabeth Eaton, Tufts Health Sciences Database: A Health Sciences Learning Infrastructure: Lessons, Issues and Opportunities. Academic Medicine, 78:254-264, 2003.
• View All