In Memoriam: Francois Grémy (1929-2014)

permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. On July 22nd, 2014 passed away professor Francois Grémy. Professor Grémy had a dual curriculum vitae. In the domain of information sciences he completed three Master degrees in As a physician he passed the Paris resident fellows' competitive examination , the " Internat de Paris " , in 1953 and obtain a specialty in neurophysiology. In 1958, at the age of 29, he was appointed as tenured professor in biophysics at the Faculty of Medicine of Tours, and two years later in 1960 as professor in bio-physics at the Pitié-Salpêtrière School of Medicine in Paris. Between 1966 and 1971, François Grémy published five comprehensive textbooks in the three scientific areas where his different training mutually contributed: biophysics, biomathematics, and biostatistics. Very soon, François recognized the key role played by information sciences in medicine and initiated at Pitié-Salpêtrière in 1966 a curriculum on the medical applications of computing techniques. To foster research in information sciences François Grémy created in 1969 the INSERM Unit U88 entitled Infor-matics and Statistics methodology in Medicine. This unit was going to be the framework for his close collaborators to develop not only clinical informatics but also clinical research, epidemiology , health informatics, statistics, and decision support systems. As a recognition of this involvement he was appointed in 1970 as professor of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics at the Pitié-Salpêtrière School of Medicine In 1967, Professor Grémy established within the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) the Technical Committee 4 (TC4) on medical informatics. The first meeting of TC4 was held in Paris in April 1968. A dozen nations were represented and François Grémy was elected as president. During his presidency (1967-1973), François Grémy initiated within TC4 several working groups that represented many emerging subfields for this new discipline. In 1973, François Grémy negotiated during the preparation of the IFIP meeting in Stockholm the creation of a separate structure devoted to the healthcare field. The result was the first MEDINFO 74 held in Stockholm at the same time and same location as the IFIP meeting (August 5-10). François Grémy acted as the chair of the MEDINFO 74 Programme Committee. The International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) was constituted as a Special Interest Group of IFIP. In 1984, François Grémy was appointed as Professor of Biostatistics and Medical Informat-ics in the University of …