Dr. Peter L. Elkin is a Professor of Medicine at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine. He received his Bachelor of Science from Union College and his M.D. from New York Medical College. He did his Internal Medicine residency at the Lahey Clinic and his NIH/NLM sponsored fellowship in Medical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Elkin has been working in Biomedical Informatics since 1981 and has been actively researching health data representation since 1987. Dr. Elkin is the Director of the Laboratory of Biomedical Informatics within the Department of Medicine at Mayo. He is the Principal Investigator on an R01 from the National Library of Medicine at the NIH entitled "Controlled Vocabulary Design for Clinical Applications." Dr. Elkin currently is the vice-chair of ASTM E31, an international standards committee focused on Health Information, he is the Chair of ASTM E31.01 the subcommittee focused on Controlled Health Vocabularies.

Dr. Peter L. Elkin is the primary author of the American National Standards Institute's (ANSI) national standard on Quality Indicators for Controlled Health Vocabularies ASTM E2087, which has also been approved by ISO TC 215 as a Technical Specification (TS17117). Dr. Elkin is the principal author on the draft ISO TC 215 Technical Specification on Health Indicators: Definitions, Relationships and Attributes. Dr. Elkin chairs ASTM E31.29, which is currently developing national standards for Bioinformatics and E31.01 on Controlled Health Terminologies. Dr. Elkin is a co-chair of the HL7 Clinical Genomics Special Interest Group and the HL7 Clinical Templates SIG. Dr. Elkin is the index recipient of the Homer R. Warner award for outstanding contribution to the field of Medical Informatics.