After serving as the department’s interim chair, Josh Peterson, MD, MPH, professor of Biomedical Informatics and Medicine, director of the Center for Precision Medicine and Vice President for Personalized Medicine, has been named chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI). His appointment is effective immediately.
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 with Vanderbilt Health.
DBMI is one of the nation’s largest departments of its kind in academic medicine and consists of more than 140 primary and secondary faculty who focus on different aspects of biomedical informatics, including precision medicine, artificial intelligence, clinical informatics, and public health informatics. The department also hosts four graduate and postgraduate training programs.
The department houses four research centers: 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, and collaborates with faculty across the Medical Center.
“The Department of Biomedical Informatics is an internationally recognized hallmark of our institution. The department’s accomplishments continue to drive countless discoveries and innovations, pushing boundaries and advancing the practice of medicine. The promise of artificial intelligence creates even more excitement for the future,” said Jeff Balser, MD, PhD, President and Chief Executive Officer of Vanderbilt Health and Dean of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.
“Under Dr. Peterson’s leadership as interim chair, DBMI has continued to flourish as the nation’s largest informatics department in terms of faculty size and is one of the most successful in terms of research funding. I look forward to working with him to build on the department’s many strengths.”
Peterson is trained in health services research, epidemiology, clinical informatics and data science. His research encompasses the translational aspects of precision medicine with a focus on population genomic screening and pharmacogenomics. He is currently funded as the contact principal investigator on multiple extramurally funded awards.
He currently serves as principal investigator for the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) Network coordinating center, which is conducting a large prospective cohort study to investigate the clinical consequences of returning monogenic and polygenic risks to a large primary care population. He also serves as principal investigator for the Vanderbilt Clinical Group within the IGNITE Pragmatic Clinical Trials Network, which is rigorously investigating the use of pharmacogenomics to guide treatment of pain, depression and risk stratification for chronic kidney disease.
Within Vanderbilt Health, Peterson is also the clinical lead for the steering committee for PREDICT (Pharmacogenomic Resource for Enhanced Decisions in Care and Treatment), the long-standing pharmacogenomic implementation program, which has tested more than 20,000 patients, returning results to patients and providers, and providing clinical decision support using a panel of pharmacogenes.
Also, he currently serves as a principal investigator for a National Institutes of Health-funded project to simulate the clinical impact and cost-effectiveness of performing sequencing across large populations over their lifetime.
“I am honored to lead DBMI as chair during a time of exciting growth within our field. This department has been my academic home for over 20 years, and it has been an immense privilege to work with our accomplished faculty who bring expertise from many academic disciplines. Our close ties with colleagues across the Medical Center give us outstanding opportunities to turn ideas and innovations into real-world practice,” said Peterson.
A frequently invited speaker on the topics of pharmacogenomics and precision medicine, Peterson has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed publications, abstracts, reviews and book chapters. He has led the design and implementation of multiple clinical decision support systems oriented toward geriatric patients, the critically ill, and patients with acute and chronic kidney disease.
He was the founding program director for Vanderbilt’s Master of Science in Applied Clinical Informatics (MSACI) program, which trains physicians and other health professionals in the field of clinical informatics. He currently directs the Vanderbilt Genomic Medicine training program.
Peterson received his medical degree from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and completed an internal medicine residency at Duke University Medical Center, a fellowship in general internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and earned a Master of Public Health from the Harvard School of Public Health.
