Michael Pencina
Chief Data Scientist, Duke Health
Michael J. Pencina, PhD, is Duke Health’s chief data scientist and serves as vice dean for data science, director of Duke AI Health, and professor of biostatistics and bioinformatics at the Duke University School of Medicine. His work bridges the fields of data science, health care, and AI, contributing to Duke’s national leadership in responsible health AI.
Dr. Pencina partners with key leaders to develop data science strategies for Duke Health that span and connect academic research and clinical care. As vice dean for data science, he develops and implements quantitative science strategies to support the School of Medicine’s missions in education and training, laboratory and clinical science, and data science. He co-founded and co-leads the national Coalition for Health AI (CHAI), a multi-stakeholder effort whose mission is to increase trustworthiness of AI by developing guidelines to drive high-quality health care through the implementation of innovative, credible, and transparent health AI systems. He serves in a leadership capacity for the Trustworthy & Responsible AI Network (TRAIN), a new organization Duke co-founded with leading health care and technology organizations to develop tools and technologies that promote the adoption of high-quality, novel, and safe health AI solutions for patient care and research. He also spearheaded establishing and co-chairs Duke Health’s Algorithm-Based Clinical Decision Support (ABCDS) Oversight Committee.
Dr. Pencina is an internationally recognized authority in the evaluation of AI algorithms. Guideline groups rely on his work to advance best practices for the application of clinical decision support tools in health delivery. He interacts frequently with investigators from academic and industry institutions as well as government officials. Since 2014, Thomson Reuters/Clarivate Analytics has regularly recognized Dr. Pencina as one of the world’s “highly cited researchers” in clinical medicine and social sciences, with more than 400 publications cited over 135,000 times. He serves as a deputy editor for statistics at JAMA-Cardiology.
In 2013, Dr. Pencina joined the Duke University faculty and served as director of biostatistics for the Duke Clinical Research Institute until 2018. Previously, he was an associate professor in the Department of Biostatistics at Boston University and the Framingham Heart Study, and director of statistical consulting at the Harvard Clinical Research Institute. He received his PhD in Mathematics and Statistics from Boston University in 2003 and holds master’s degrees from the University of Warsaw in actuarial mathematics and business culture.
