Adrian H. Zai, MD, PhD, MPH, will join UMass Medical School in May as chief research informatics officer and associate professor of population & quantitative health sciences, according to an announcement by Terence R. Flotte, MD, the Celia and Isaac Haidak Professor, executive deputy chancellor, provost and dean of the School of Medicine.
Dr. Zai will also serve as director of the data sciences core within PQHS and director of the biomedical informatics core within the UMass Center for Clinical and Translational Sciences.
Zai will provide leadership and vision in the areas of clinical informatics, research computing, data warehousing, informatics education, grant writing and technology innovation, all of which directly support the clinical, translational and basic science, and academic needs of the UMMS research community. He will also have a key role in advancing the clinical and translational research mission, working closely with Flotte; Jeroan Allison, MD, MS, chair and professor of population and quantitative health sciences; Bruce Barton, PhD, professor of population & quantitative health sciences and director of the PQHS quantitative methods core; and with Katherine Luzuriaga, MD, the UMass Memorial Health Care Chair in Biomedical Research; professor of molecular medicine, pediatrics and medicine; director of the CCTS; and vice provost for clinical and translational research.
Zai comes to UMMS from the Center for Innovation and Digital Healthcare at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he has been director of clinical research since 2018. Previously he was director of research at Partners eCare, a joint initiative of Partners and Epic to develop and implement an integrated, electronic health information system at all institutions across the Partners network.
As a clinical research fellow jointly at Harvard/MIT Health Science & Technology, he designed the first heart failure registry for Partners High Performance Medicine.
Zai holds a master’s in public health (Healthcare Management) from the Harvard School of Public Health and received his MD/PhD from Boston University. His broad experience and deep understanding of the intersection of biomedical research and computing technology will be a transformative addition to the research, academic, educational and clinical enterprises, Flotte said.
