Dr. Musen conducts research related to intelligent systems, the Semantic Web, reusable ontologies and knowledge representations, and biomedical decision support. His long-standing work on a system known as Protégé has led to an open-source technology now used by thousands of developers around the world to build intelligent computer systems and new computer applications for e-science and the Semantic Web. He is known for his research on the application of intelligent computer systems to assist health-care workers in guideline-directed therapy and in management of clinical trials. He is principal investigator of the National Center for Biomedical Ontology, one of the seven National Centers for Biomedical Computing supported by the NIH Roadmap.

Dr. Musen is Professor of Medicine (Biomedical Informatics) and Computer Science (by courtesy) at Stanford University, where he is head of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research. He holds an MD from Brown University and a PhD from Stanford.

In 1989, Dr. Musen received the Young Investigator Award for Research in Medical Knowledge Systems from the American Association of Medical Systems and Informatics. He received a Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation in 1992. In 2006, he was recipient of the Donald A. B. Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics from the American Medical Informatics Association. Dr. Musen sits on the editorial boards of several journals related to biomedical informatics and computer science. He is co-editor of the Handbook of Medical Informatics (Springer-Verlag, 1997) and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Applied Ontology.