Dr. Zhang's current focus is on strategic thinking about transforming healthcare and biomedical discovery through informatics, data science, and artificial intelligence. He is Dean, Professor, and Glassell Family Foundation Distinguished Chair in Informatics Excellence at the School of Biomedical Informatics (SBMI) at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). He is also the Director of the National Center for Cognitive Informatics and Decision Making in Healthcare and led the ONC SHARPC project on enhancing patient-centered cognitive support in EHR and Health IT. Since appointed as the Dean, he has created a rapid growth for the school, tripling both faculty and student numbers in a few years and secured funding for a new school building. He has more than 30 years of research, education, product development, consulting, and management experience in Human Technology Integration, Usability and Workflow, Cognitive Science, Information Visualization, Decision Making, and Machine Learning. He has authored many publications and has been the principal investigator or co-investigator on numerous grants and contracts ($35 million as PI and $100 million as PI/Co-PI). He has trained a large number of PhD students, Master's students and postdoctoral fellows. Dr. Zhang was a recipient of John P. McGovern Outstanding Teacher Award from UTHealth, a recipient of the George H. W. Bush Award from the Asian Pacific American Heritage Association, a Fellow of American College of Medical Informatics (FACMI), a Fellow of American Medical Informatics Association (FAMIA), and a Fellow of International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (FIAHSI). Dr. Zhang received his PhD in Cognitive Science (world's first) from the University of California at San Diego and his BS in biological sciences from the University of Science and Technology of China (through the Special Class of Gifted Young).
