Albert M. Lai, PhD, FACMI, FAMIA
Deputy Director, Institute for Informatics (I2)
Chief Research Information Officer
School of Medicine
Professor of Medicine, Division of General Medical Sciences, School of Medicine
Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, School of Engineering and Applied Science
Albert M. Lai, PhD, FACMI, FAMIA, is focused on applying computer science and informatics techniques to solve problems in the clinical domain.
Background
Albert M. Lai, PhD, is the Deputy Director for the Institute for Informatics, the Chief Research Information Officer for the School of Medicine, and a Professor of Medicine in the Division of General Medical Sciences at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Dr. Lai specializes in the development of research informatics infrastructure and is well recognized in the fields of clinical research informatics and consumer health informatics. His recent research has focused on the application of natural language processing, temporal reasoning and information fusion to generate a longitudinal computable phenotype to support clinical trial prescreening. His research portfolio has been supported by a combination of NCATS, NLM, NCI, AHRQ and PCORI grants and contracts. Previously, Dr. Lai served as the Associate Chief Research Information Officer at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.
Dr. Lai received his PhD with distinction in biomedical informatics from Columbia University, where his research focused on designing and evaluating the effectiveness of training older adults to use a home telemedicine system at a distance. Dr. Lai also received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science from Columbia University. While working on his Master’s degree, he conducted research on performance analysis of thin-client computing over wide area networks.
Dr. Lai’s leadership in the clinical research and consumer health informatics communities has been recognized through his election to working group leadership positions within the American Medical Informatics Association as well as his participation in federal study sections and advisory committees.
Research Interests
- Clinical research informatics
- Clinical informatics
- Consumer health informatics
- Telemedicine
- Usability
- Natural language processing
- Mobile health
Lab Members
- Denis Griffis, The Ohio State University
- Sean Yu, PhD Candidate in Biomedical Engineering, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Institute for Informatics
- Kriti Bhattarai, PhD Candidate in Computer Science & Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis, McKelvey School of Engineering
Selected Publications
- Comparison of UMLS Terminologies to Identify Risk of Heart Disease Using Clinical Notes. Journal of Biomedical Informatics
- Textual Inference for Eligibility Criteria Resolution in Clinical Trials. Journal of Biomedical Informatics
- A Review of Approaches to Identifying Patient Phenotype Cohorts Using Electronic Health Records. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association
- Learning to Temporally Order Medical Events in Clinical Text. Proceedings of the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL2012)
- Cross-Narrative Temporal Ordering of Medical Events. Association for Computational Linguistics Annual Meeting (ACL2014)
- The REmote Patient Education in a Telemedicine Environment Architecture (REPETE). Telemedicine and e-Health