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Dr. Paul Law is Director of Medical Informatics at the Kennedy Krieger Institute. He is also an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Department of Pediatrics.
Biographical Sketch:
Dr. Law earned his MD from Johns Hopkins University in 1997 and received a MPH 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:
Approximately one in every 166 children living in the U.S. is diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder – 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 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.
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.
Recent Publications/Presentations:
Focus on Autism Podcast: Listen to a Q&A
with Dr. Law about the Interactive Autism Network.
Law P, Lehmann H: Informatics Inventory of Autism Clinical Research in Practice. National Library of Medicine Training Conference 2005.
Darmstadt GL, Saha SK, Ahmed AS, Chowdhury MA, Law PA, Ahmed S, Alam MA, Black RE, Santosham M: Effect of topical treatment with skin barrier-enhancing emollients on nosocomial infections in preterm infants in Bangladesh: a randomised controlled trial. Lancet 2005; 365(9464):1039-45
Law P, Hoen T, Hart N: Fostering Autism Research through ISAAC, a Scalable Web Application. Medinfo 2004; 2004(CD):1708
Hollander E, Phillips A, King BH, Guthrie D, Aman MG, Law P, Owley T, Robinson R: Impact of recent findings on study design of future autism clinical trials. CNS Spectrums 2004; 9(1):49-56
Belsito KM, Law PA, Kirk KS, Landa RJ, Zimmerman AW: Lamotrigine therapy for autistic disorder: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. Journal of Autism and Related Developmental Disorders 2001; 31(2):175-81
Comi AM, Zimmerman AW, Frye VH, Law PA, Peeden JN: Familial clustering of autoimmune disorders and evaluation of medical risk factors in autism. Journal of Child Neurology 1999; 14(6):388-94. | 