Peter Embi

Peter J. Embí is an internationally recognized physician-scientist, educator, and leader in biomedical and clinical-research informatics. He is widely credited as a founder of the clinical research informatics field, created the nation's first Chief Research Information Officer (CRIO) role, and originated the concept of "algorithmovigilance" for monitoring AI in healthcare. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and holds fellowships in the American College of Physicians (FACP), the American College of Medical Informatics (FACMI), AMIA (FAMIA), and the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (FIAHSI). He has authored more than 160 peer-reviewed articles, abstracts, books, and book chapters.

His academic career began at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, where he was founding director of the UC Center for Health Informatics and led informatics for the Cincinnati Center for Clinical and Translational Science and Training. He then moved to The Ohio State University, where he served as professor and vice-chair, assistant dean, and Chief Research Information Officer — and where, in 2014, he co-founded the data-integration startup Signet Accel, creator of the federated platform Avec®.

In October 2016 he was named President and CEO of the Regenstrief Institute in Indianapolis, a role he held from 2016 to 2021, concurrent with appointments as Professor and Associate Dean for Informatics and Health Services Research at the Indiana University School of Medicine and VP for Learning Health Systems at IU Health. During his tenure he oversaw a roughly 50% increase in funded research and expanded the institute's national and international reach.

Effective January 1, 2022, Embí joined Vanderbilt University Medical Center as Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) and Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation. He stepped down from those leadership roles on May 1, 2025, remaining as a senior faculty member and co-Director of the DBMI ADVANCE AI Center. He is a past President and Board Chair of AMIA and current President of the American College of Medical Informatics, and serves on national bodies including the NIH National Library of Medicine Board of Scientific Counselors and AHRQ's National Advisory Council.

• Backs and builds at the intersection of clinical/biomedical informatics, health data interoperability, learning health systems, and AI/ML in medicine — the domains where he is an academic authority.
• His "investing" is primarily as an academic entrepreneur: co-inventing and co-founding health-IT startups, partnering with companies to create and evaluate innovations, and building programs that help faculty translate discoveries into practice.
• Strong bias toward rigorously evaluated, evidence-based health IT — he champions "algorithmovigilance" (ongoing surveillance of deployed clinical algorithms), signaling a preference for ventures that take safety, validation, and real-world evidence seriously.
• Values federated, interoperable data infrastructure (the thesis behind Signet Accel's Avec® platform) that enables multi-institution research and translational medicine.