Xiaoqian Jiang, PhD earns esteemed IEEE recognition

Xiaoqian Jiang, PhD, chair of the Department of Health Data Science and Artificial Intelligence and the Christopher Sarofim Family Professor in Biomedical Informatics and Bioengineering, has recently earned an award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He has been named one of three co-recipients for the 2027 IEEE Innovation in Societal Infrastructure Award. This recognition is one of IEEE’s most prestigious, career-level awards.

The Innovation in Societal Infrastructure Award is one of IEEE’s Technical Field Awards. It was established in 2011 and IEEE states that “this prestigious award recognizes significant technological achievements and contributions to the establishment, development, and proliferation of innovative societal infrastructure systems through the application of information technology with an emphasis on distributed computing systems, celebrating significant advancements in the field.” Recipient selection is administered through the Technical Field Awards Council of the IEEE Awards Board.

“I am deeply grateful to be recognized among a very small group of recipients for this IEEE,” noted Jiang, who also serves as Associate Vice President for Medical AI at UTHealth Houston. “Professionally, it affirms the importance of building privacy-preserving technologies that allow institutions to collaborate on health data while protecting patients and maintaining public trust.”

Jiang earned the award with two other co-recipients; Jaideep Vaidya, PhD from Rutgers Business School and Lucila Ohno-Machado, MD, PhD from Yale University. The trio’s achievements were recognized because of their “leadership in designing and deploying privacy-preserving distributed clinical research infrastructures enabling secure, large-scale health data collaboration,” according to IEEE.

Jiang continued by stating, “our systems and infrastructures that IEEE is acknowledging with this award provide health care and research institutions with the ability to collaborate at scale without centralizing sensitive patient data, which is essential for advancing biomedical discovery responsibly.”

To learn more about the Innovation in Societal Infrastructure Award, visit this website.