Academic Biography for Michael Halper

Michael Halper received the B.S. degree (summa cum laude) in computer science from New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT); the M.S. degree in computer science from Fairleigh Dickinson University; and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from NJIT.  In his Ph.D. dissertation, he developed a comprehensive "part-whole" model for object-oriented databases (OODBs), at the heart of which is a part-whole semantic relationship.  The dissertation also introduced an extensive graphical notation, called OOdini, for OODB schemata and an accompanying graphical (X Windows-based) OODB schema editor.  During his graduate studies, he was the recipient of a Garden State Graduate Fellowship from the State of New Jersey.

Dr. Halper is a professor of computer science at Kean University.  He is also a research associate at the Ontology and Medical Informatics Laboratory of NJIT.  Before joining the faculty of Kean University, Dr. Halper spent a short time as a visiting researcher at GMD-IPSI (formerly part of what is now the Fraunhofer Institute) in Darmstadt, Germany.  His research interests include conceptual and object-oriented data modeling, part-whole modeling, extensible data models, OODB systems, and medical informatics (with an emphasis on medical terminologies).  He has worked on the OOHVR project---funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Advanced Technology Program---to model controlled terminologies using OODB technology.  Dr. Halper is currently a Co-PI on a National Library of Medicine (NLM) grant that focuses on partitioning and abstraction techniques for auditing and extending the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS).  Dr. Halper's work has also been supported by the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology.  He has had numerous papers in international journals, conferences, and workshops.  Dr. Halper received Kean University's 2003 Presidential Excellence Award for Distinguished Scholarship.  He is a member of The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi.