Prior to this Dr. Richards was an Assistant Professor in the Division of Health Science Informatics and Department of Anesthesiology at Johns Hopkins University. Rafael’s current interests and activities are in data standards, medical device data integration, and modernizing VA databases to enable enterprise data federation with Linked Data sources. Prior to medicine, Rafael earned as B.S. Engineering from Swarthmore, M.S. Applied Mathematics from Lehigh University, and worked several years in industry in scientific software applications with IBM and in the UK office of Wolfram Research on Mathematica. Rafael is currently an invited expert in the Semantic Web in Healthcare and Life Sciences of W3C.