Peter J. Embí, MD, MS

Peter J. Embí, MD, MS, is a physician-scientist and internationally recognized leader in biomedical informatics — the field that connects health data, biomedical evidence, computation, and care to improve health and accelerate discovery. His work has helped shape clinical research informatics, real-world evidence generation, AI oversight, and data-driven learning health systems.

Across leadership roles in universities, health systems, research institutes, professional societies, and national advisory bodies, Embí has focused on a common challenge: how to make biomedical knowledge more reliable, reusable, computable, and actionable. His work bridges research, care delivery, public health, technology, and policy — with a particular emphasis on ensuring that AI and data-driven systems improve health safely, equitably, and transparently.

Embí is credited among the founders of clinical research informatics, the discipline that uses electronic health records and health data to make biomedical research faster, broader, and more rigorous. Early in his career he created and held the nation’s first role of Chief Research Information Officer — a position now common across academic health centers — and his studies of EHR-based clinical trial recruitment and computerized clinical documentation became widely cited reference points for the field.

He has led several of the country’s premier informatics organizations. After founding a health-informatics center at the University of Cincinnati and building research-informatics programs at The Ohio State University, he served as President and CEO of the Regenstrief Institute and the Leonard Betley Professor of Medicine at Indiana University, with senior informatics and learning-health-system roles across IU and IU Health. In 2022 he joined Vanderbilt University Medical Center as Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Medicine and Endowed Director of Biomedical Informatics, where he chaired one of the largest departments of its kind in academic medicine and served as Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation.

In 2025 he stepped back from those broad administrative roles to focus on the national challenges of trustworthy health AI, learning health systems, and biomedical knowledge infrastructure. At Vanderbilt he founded the ADVANCE AI Center, co-directs the Rapid Learning Health System Center, and leads AI governance across the medical center.

His current field-building work includes TRAIN, the Trustworthy and Responsible AI Network, and the VAMOS Collaborative, both aimed at helping health systems govern, monitor, evaluate, and learn from AI in real-world settings. Together, these efforts extend his broader commitment to making biomedical knowledge and computational tools trustworthy in practice, not merely promising in principle.

This work builds on a longer arc. He conceived and named algorithmovigilance — the systematic, ongoing surveillance of clinical AI for safety, bias, and performance drift, modeled on the way medicine monitors drugs after approval — and has helped shape national efforts on the responsible development and oversight of health AI. The through-line across his career is a single conviction: that medicine advances fastest when knowledge is computable, connected, and worthy of trust.

Embí is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), current President of the American College of Medical Informatics, and past President and Board Chair of AMIA. Within the Academy he contributes to national efforts on AI and emerging technologies in health — serving on the steering committee for the national AI Code of Conduct initiative, co-authoring NAM’s 2025 Vital Directions guidance on AI priorities for health and health care, and taking part in broader NAM work on the societal, ethical, and clinical implications of emerging technologies.

He has authored more than 180 peer-reviewed articles and is a frequently invited speaker. His full bibliography is available on Google Scholar and PubMed.