Associate Professor and Assistant Dean of Education
Department of Health Data Science and Artificial Intelligence
Contact
Toufeeq.A.Syed@uth.tmc.edu | 713-500-3694
Toufeeq Ahmed Syed, PhD is an Associate Professor and Assistant Dean of Education Informatics at McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics at UTHealth Houston. He is also an Associate Professor at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston. Before joining UTHealth in 2023, he was Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.
Dr. Syed has more than a decade of experience serving in Informatics and Artificial Intelligence leadership roles: He was Chief Technology Officer for an NSF-funded AI startup, Founding Director and Executive Director at Health IT at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and Assistant Dean of Education Informatics for Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and has developed many innovative technology platforms including VSTAR, QuizTime, TurnOut, and Spark. He has over 15 years of experience developing national online platforms. He actively leads education informatics research and innovations and is active in national and international medical education technology and data standards committees.
Dr. Syed is a computer scientist by training with expertise in Artificial Intelligence, education technology, social network analysis, student portfolio systems, natural language processing, information retrieval, data integration, ontologies, and adaptive recommender systems. He has more than twenty-eight peer-reviewed publications in the above research areas. He held the prestigious National Library of Medicine's post-doctoral fellowship from 2010 to 2012 and was awarded Arizona State University's Challenges Innovator Award 2010 for his Ph.D. dissertation work. He gave an invited TED Talk at TEDx Phoenix 2010 on Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing.
Syed Lab is leading Precision Education in Healthcare and Mentoring Networks research by developing innovative AI-based national online platforms (National Research Mentoring Network, AIM-AHEAD Connect) to deliver personalized education, mentoring, and career growth, thereby enabling intervention-based research and increasing the nation's biomedical and Artificial Intelligence workforce.