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 at McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics at UTHealth Houston, recently earned an award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He has been named one of three co-recipients for the 2027 Innovation in Societal Infrastructure Award. This recognition is one of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' most prestigious, career-level awards.

The Innovation in Societal Infrastructure Award is one of the institute's Technical Field Awards. It was established in 2011, and the institute 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.” The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers selects recipients through the Technical Field Awards Council of their 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, MBA, 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 the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Jiang continued by stating, “Our systems and infrastructures that IEEE is acknowledging with this award provide healthcare 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 the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers awards website.