Faculty & Research

Education

Ph.D., Medical Biophysics and Computing (Medical Informatics), University of Utah (1980)
M.S., Electrical Engineering, California State University, Long Beach (1976)
B.S., Electrical Engineering, University of Poona, India (1973)

Research Interests

Open source Electronic Medical Records (OpenVISTA); Laboratory Information Systems for the Life Sciences and Healthcare industry; Data Integration and Data Mining in the Life Sciences and Healthcare environment; Validation and Integration of Systems; Spread of Infectious Diseases in Hospitals and communities; Development of Tools and Databases for Microbial Genome Systems.

Before joining Indiana University, Mahesh Merchant was a Senior Research Scientist in the Computer-Aided Drug Discovery group at an international pharmaceutical organization. He worked with genomic data from the human genome in identifying potential drug targets for the Central Nervous System and Infectious Diseases groups. He developed several databases and data mining tools and installed and integrated a Laboratory Information System for managing the large amount of data generated by microarray experiments across the enterprise. He has gained considerable experience in Validation (GLP, GMP, GxP) while working in a FDA regulated environment. Prior to joining the pharmaceutical organization, he worked at Physio-Control Corporation for 4 years to help develop a multi-lead electrocardiographic system for detection of ischemia and Coronary Artery Disease (CAD). He and his colleagues had developed this system while he held a faculty position at the University of Utah. From 1983 to 1989, he worked as a Software Engineer to develop planetarium systems and high-end flight simulators at Evans and Sutherland in Salt Lake City, Utah.