Albert M. Lai

Albert M. Lai, PhD, is a Professor of Medicine and Computer Science & Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, serving as Chief Research Information Officer (CRIO) for the School of Medicine and Deputy Director of the Institute for Informatics, Data Science and Biostatistics (I²DB). He leads WashU Medicine's data warehousing and informatics services, driving innovation in clinical research infrastructure. His expertise spans biomedical informatics, natural language processing (NLP), and telemedicine. Dr. Lai is also Deputy Faculty Lead for WashU’s Digital Transformation initiative, focusing on secure AI integration with sensitive healthcare data. He holds affiliations with the Institute for Public Health, Siteman Cancer Center, and the Center for Applied Health Informatics (CAHI).

Research Interests: Dr. Lai develops informatics infrastructure to support clinical trial prescreening, leveraging NLP and machine learning for phenotype extraction from EHR data. He also explores telemedicine, mobile health applications, and EHR-driven cardiovascular health interventions for cancer survivors. His recent work addresses AI ethics in healthcare, including responsible data sharing and bias mitigation in generative AI models.

Key Contributions: Over 77 peer-reviewed publications across clinical informatics, AI in healthcare, and pandemic response strategies. His projects include EHR-based cardiovascular health tools, SARS-CoV-2 surveillance in schools, and machine learning models for predicting transplant outcomes. Active mentorship of PhD/MSTP students in translational informatics and data science.

Labs/Teams: Leads the Informatics Services Core and collaborates with the CRITICAL consortium for intensive care analytics. Engages in multi-institutional initiatives like the Greater Plains Collaborative for cancer data integration.