R. P. C. Rodgers first contacted Medical Informatics in high school, when he was fortunate to be accepted for an experimental program which placed him in a summer job working for the group of Dr. Homer Warner at the University of Utah, pioneers in computer-aided medical monitoring and diagnosis. He was awarded a BA in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard College, and a M.D. from the University of Utah, and subsequently did postdoctoral training at the University of London, U.K., the Laboratory for Theoretical Biology at the National Cancer Institute, and the International Institute for Cellular and Molecular Pathology in Brussels, Belgium. He completed a residency in Clinical Pathology at the University of California, San Francisco, where he subsequently joined the faculty of the Department of Laboratory Medicine, receiving a subsequent appointment in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry.
Rodgers joined the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications (LHNCBC, a research and development arm of the U.S. National Library of Medicine, or NLM) in 1992, where he works on the Information Sources Map (ISM) Project, one of the three components of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Project. He introduced World-Wide Web (WWW) technology to the NLM, and continues to develop new services delivered via the NLM HyperDOC Web server, including OnLine Images (OLI), a system for the presentation of large collections of cataloged images, and Sourcerer, a thesaurus-driven automated source identification system.
Dr. Rodgers has published a book, several book chapters, and a number of journal articles on various aspects of computer-aided design, optimization, and analysis of clinical chemical analytical methods and the predictive power of clinical laboratory tests, the application of computers in diverse areas of medicine, and network-based biomedical information retrieval. Five of the software systems he developed while at the University of California are now licensed to outside users by the University.