Zhongming Zhao, PhD, MS

Zhongming Zhao, Ph.D., M.S. is a professor at the School of Biomedical Informatics (SBMI) and appointed as the Chair Professor for Precision Health. He is the founding director of the new Center for Precision Health, which is a joint venture between SBMI and the UTHealth School of Public Health. Zhao holds a joint appointment between SBMI and the UTHealth School of Public Health. Before coming to UTHealth, Zhao was a professor in the Departments of Biomedical Informatics, Psychiatry and Cancer Biology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and held Ingram Professorship of Cancer Research. While at Vanderbilt University, Zhao also served as the chief bioinformatics officer of the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC), the director of the VICC Bioinformatics Resource Center, director of the Bioinformatics and Systems Medicine Laboratory and the associate director of the Vanderbilt Center for Quantitative Sciences. Zhao previously participated in a Keck Foundation Postdoctoral fellowship at the W.M. Keck Center for Computational and Structural Biology and the Consortium for Bioinformatics of the Gulf Coast Consortia in Houston. After completing the fellowship, Zhao started his role as a tenure-track assistant professor at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine. Zhao is a member of numerous organizations including the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG). He has more than 20 years of bioinformatics and systems biology research experience, collaborated with more than 100 investigators, and has authored/co-authored more than 280 papers in these areas. His work has been supported by more than 50 funded grants totaling more than $100 million.