Muhammad Walji, PhD, MS, earned both of his graduate degrees from McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics at UTHealth Houston. Currently, he serves as professor and the inaugural Chair of the Department of Clinical and Health Informatics at McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics. He started that role in September of 2023.

Dr. Walji serves as PI on studies funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality that use informatics approaches for improving patient safety, quantifying dental diagnostic failures, measuring dental quality, using mHealth to collect post-operative patient-reported outcomes, and designing interventions to reduce antibiotic prescribing by dentists. In addition, he leads a multi-institutional team that crafted the BigMouth Dental Data Repository; a joint data warehouse that contains partially de-identified dental data from electronic health records of various dental schools. In 2016, he was named a recipient of the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.

Dr. Walji has a joint appointment at the UTHealth Houston School of Dentistry where he holds the Endowed Chair in Dental Informatics. Dr. Walji is also the Director of the Texas Center for Oral Healthcare Quality and Safety.

• Tell us about your research center and/or what research/work you are currently working on?
  The mission at the Texas Center for Oral Healthcare Quality and Safety is to improve health by implementing a person-centered learning health system to ensure everyone receives safe, effective, and appropriate oral healthcare. A Learning Health System (LHS) is one in which patients and clinicians work together to choose care based on best evidence, and to drive discovery as a natural outgrowth of every clinical encounter in order to ensure the right care to the right patient at the right time. We are improving oral health by using Big Data and analytics to continuously evaluate dental care and create better patient outcomes. The center develops innovative learning health systems where informatics tools help dental providers capture patient data that researchers and computer programs analyze to improve care. The improvement process is ongoing, with patient care informing research, and research advancing patient care.

Education

• PhD, 2006, Biomedical Informatics, McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics at UTHealth Houston
• MS, 2002, Biomedical Informatics, McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics at UTHealth Houston
• BS, 2001, Biology, University of Texas at Dallas

Areas of Expertise

• Dental Informatics
• Patient Safety and Quality
• Human-centered Computing