Masoud Rouhizadeh, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the University of Florida College of Pharmacy Department of Pharmaceutical Outcomes and Policy, was elected a 2026 Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association, or AMIA.
The designation recognizes those who apply informatics skills and knowledge toward enhancing personal and population health, improving organizational performance and learning and individual empowerment in health care. The 127 members of the 2026 class of fellows were selected by a committee of 84 reviewers, and they will join a community of 647 current AMIA fellows during an induction ceremony on May 20, 2026, at the AMIA Amplify Informatics Conference in Denver.
For Rouhizadeh, who teaches and conducts research as part of the UF AI in Health Sciences initiative and leads the AI Collaboration Hub at the UF Intelligent Critical Care Center, the designation speaks to the interdisciplinary nature of his work.
“The AMIA is composed of physicians, informaticians and engineers, who work together to build the future of AI in medicine and health care. To be recognized by such a community means you have contributed to many different facets of that interdisciplinary association,” he said.
Rouhizadeh’s work focuses on the development of informatics infrastructure for multisite health care research networks, specifically large language model pipelines that identify and integrate non-clinical factors that impact a patient’s health outcomes. By accounting for environmental, behavioral and socioeconomic factors that affect health, Rouhizadeh aims to address disparities in access to care. As a fellow of the AMIA, Rouhizadeh will impart his unique expertise as a computer scientist working in health care to the next generation of scientists.
“I’m excited to pay it forward and mentor junior scientists who are starting their careers,” Rouhizadeh said. “Our field can sometimes be difficult when it comes to combining medical expertise with engineering practices. Being able to translate between those disciplines is a skill set that any expert in our field should acquire. Through my mentorship to the next generation, I’ll be helping them navigate these two worlds.”
Rouhizadeh’s path to AI-driven informatics was shaped by both professional passion and a twist of fate. As a doctoral student at Oregon Health and Science University, he became immersed in a community of medical experts whose commitment to improving health outcomes proved infectious. He went on to complete a postdoctoral fellowship in biomedical informatics at the University of Pennsylvania, then led AI initiatives in healthcare at Johns Hopkins Medicine and co-founded the Johns Hopkins Center for Clinical Natural Language Processing. Now, with over 16 years of experience, that same drive to create meaningful change continues to fuel his enthusiasm for each new project.
“Even though I don’t interact with patients directly, I see that our findings are applicable to people’s lives, in policy making or in decision support systems, helping overwhelmed clinicians make more informed decisions,” he said. “Having an impact on real people is immensely meaningful to me.”