Dr. Bookman currently serves as Senior Advisor for Program Development & Policy at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, and as Director of the UHealth Care Lab, a center for innovation in care delivery, at the University of Miami Health System.

Dr. Bookman received his undergraduate degree with honors from Brown University in computational neuroscience, and his PhD in physiology studying ion channel biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. As a graduate student, Dr. Bookman founded a scientific instrumentation company that he later sold after 5 profitable years. During his postdoctoral training at the Biozentrum in Basel, Switzerland, Dr. Bookman studied synaptic transmission and developed biophysical and optical methods to measure the kinetics of exocytosis from single cells, work which he further developed as a member of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Pennsylvania and continued after his move to UM in 1991. Extending these single-cell techniques to airway epithelial cells, his laboratory identified signal transduction pathways that control ciliary beating frequency and thus contribute to airway clearance.  In collaboration with his graduate students and post-docs, the Bookman laboratory has developed instrumentation and software to support imaging, neuroscience research, and education, all of which is broadly disseminated through either open source or commercial channels.

At UM, he was the founding director of the DNA Microarray Facility and served as director of the school’s MD/PhD Program for 12 years. Dr. Bookman served UM’s medical school in a variety of leadership roles as Associate Dean for Graduate Studies, Associate Dean for Research & Graduate Studies, and then as Executive Dean for Research and Research Training. As UM’s Vice Provost for Research, Dr. Bookman was UM’s senior research official, responsible for research across all UM campuses. In this role, he also served as the Research Integrity Officer (RIO) and also chaired the Patents & Copyrights Committee, founded and chaired the Conflict of Interest Committee, and served as Institutional Official (IO) for the university’s laboratory animal program across 4 campuses, including during an AAALAC accreditation. He also integrated pre- and post-award offices into a unified research administration group and launched units dedicated to research reporting, research strategic planning, research space planning, and initiation of clinical trials.

Dr. Bookman is active on the state level through his championing of the Florida Biomedical Research Program for which he drafted the original legislation, and served as Chair of the state’s Biomedical Research Advisory Council for many years. Since 2013, he has worked with the deans of Florida’s 9 med schools to create a new 501(c)3 – the Florida Medical Schools Quality Network, Inc. (FMSQN). As Vice President of the FMSQN, Dr. Bookman works to bring the research capacity at Florida’s med schools to bear on problems facing FL’s Medicaid program and patients. Nationally, Dr. Bookman is a long-time member of various NIH and NSF review panels, including The Human Brain Project, the joint NIH/NSF Computational Neuroscience Program and the Biophysics of Neural Systems. Dr. Bookman has also been a member and chair of various professional development groups at the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), as well as serving on a variety of ad hoc AAMC committees. Dr. Bookman represents the AAMC on AAALAC International and was recently elected to their Board of Directors.