Kendra Siler, Ph.D., is a nationally recognized leader in technologies and policies to support communities’ needs, digital security, information sharing, and interoperability. Dr. Siler has 20 years of experience in technology architecture design and community capacity building for complex healthcare, transportation, and communication issues. She is an appointed stakeholder advisor to the White House Office of American Innovation and works in an advisory role to several federal agencies.

At CommunityHealth IT, Dr. Siler led the development of one of the first operational community-based Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) for rural and underserved patients; this HIE was appointed by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to allow veteran-initiated electronic sharing of their MyHealtheVet health records with civilian providers to improve veterans’ healthcare access. Dr. Siler was the primary writer of 2019 federal award-winning Technical Section Volume 1 of the “Health Industry Cybersecurity Practices” that is being widely distributed nationwide by HHS to help healthcare organizations of all sizes improve their cybersecurity practices. She is an appointed expert for the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Transportation Research Board Panel for Emergency Management in State Transportation Agencies. For Dr. Siler’s depth and breadth of work in helping the nation’s rural health systems adopt health technologies, she received a 2013 Critical Access and Rural Hospital Champion Award from the head of the U.S. Office of the National Coordinator.

Dr. Siler received a Ph.D. from the University of Florida Department of Microbiology and Cell Science where she specialized in Immunology and Biochemistry. She received a National Research Service Award (NRSA) Fellowship to do post-doctoral research at the McKnight Brain Institute. During her time at the McKnight Brain Institute, she also started working on combining technologies to improve community health and the best ways to protect the privacy and security of centralized data.