Peter Embí, MD, MS, professor and chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) and Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation for Vanderbilt University Medical Center, will step down from these leadership roles effective May 1. Through this transition, he will remain with VUMC as a senior faculty member and as the director of the DBMI ADVANCE Center.
Josh Peterson, MD, MPH, professor of Biomedical Informatics and Medicine, director of the Center for Precision Medicine and Vice President for Personalized Medicine, will serve as DBMI’s interim chair. Peterson, who joined the Vanderbilt faculty in 2002, is an internationally recognized researcher and educator in the field of biomedical informatics and maintains an internal medicine practice at VUMC.
“Under Dr. Embí’s direction, DBMI has reached new heights. Peter brought energy and vision to the department’s initiatives that will have a lasting impact. His contributions to our programs in artificial intelligence have us well positioned for the future as we seek to harness its full potential,” said Jeff Balser, MD, PhD, President and CEO of VUMC and Dean of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.
“A well-established leader in DBMI and our organization, Dr. Peterson continues to make substantial contributions to our programs in personalized medicine and is well prepared to serve as the department’s interim chair. I want to thank him in advance for his service.”
DBMI is one of the nation’s largest departments of its kind in academic medicine and consists of more than 130 faculty who focus on different aspects of biomedical informatics, including precision medicine, big data, clinical informatics, education and more.
Composed of four centers, DBMI includes the AI Discovery & Vigilance to Accelerate Innovation & Clinical Excellence (ADVANCE) Center, Center for Precision Medicine, Center for Improving the Public’s Health through Informatics, and Vanderbilt Clinical Informatics Center.
Since joining VUMC in 2021, Embí has led a period of rapid growth for DBMI during which the department has added 33 new primary or secondary faculty, thereby maintaining its status as the nation’s largest and most impactful biomedical informatics department.
During Embí’s tenure as chair, he has overseen a 69% increase in DBMI’s extramural research expenditure, increasing from $49 million to $83 million. There has been a significant expansion in the number of grants from foundations like the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to complement the department’s grants from the National Institutes of Health and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
Embí, who holds the Directorship in Biomedical Informatics, also developed and implemented a new strategic plan for DBMI and launched the ADVANCE Center. He helped expand the department’s computational and data infrastructure to enable advanced informatics research and innovation.
As Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation, Embí also made considerable contributions, including the oversight for the successful cloud migration of BioVU, Vanderbilt’s collection of de-identified genetic data, and the expanded use of its data and resources by VUMC researchers.
In recognition of his contributions to the field, Embí has been elected a fellow of the American College of Physicians and is currently serving as president of the American College of Medical Informatics. He is also a member of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics. He has also served in numerous national leadership roles, including as past president and chair of the Board of Directors of the AMIA. In 2024, he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.
