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 an Associate Professor 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.