William Hersh is a medical informatics expert and an accomplished academician. He currently holds the position of Professor and Chair at the Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology at Oregon Health & Science University. He holds a Doctor of Medicine degree in medicine from the University of Illinois College of Medicine and a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He also studied informatics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Earlier in his career, Hersh pursued his postdoctoral fellowship in Medical Informatics at Harvard University and was also a Resident in Internal Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research interests revolve around health information technology, clinical decision-support systems, information retrieval and extraction, and evidence-based medicine. He has authored over 200 articles in peer-reviewed journals and has written a leading textbook in the field of Medical Informatics.

Hersh is a respected authority in his field and served as a founding fellow and past-president of the American Medical Informatics Association. He is the recipient of multiple awards and recognition for his work, his dedication to teaching has awarded him several accolades over the years, including the OHSU School of Medicine's prestigious Robert E. Shope MD, PhD, Faculty Recognition Award.