Elkin named UB Distinguished Professor

Peter L. Elkin, professor and chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, has been named a UB Distinguished Professor.

The UB Distinguished Professor designation was created by the Office of the Provost to recognize full professors who have achieved true distinction and are leaders in their fields.

It is open to faculty members who have been a full professor for at least five years and who have achieved national or international prominence and a distinguished reputation within their field through significant contributions to the research/scholarly literature or through artistic performance or achievement in the fine arts.

Elkin is an internationally recognized researcher in biomedical informatics and applied ontology, including natural language processing and artificial intelligence. He currently has seven grants from the National Institutes of Health, three VA awards and two industry awards, and serves as the informatics core director for UB’s CTSA Award, the largest grant award given by the NIH. He has over 200 peer-reviewed publications.

Elkin is a master of the American College of Physicians and a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, the American Medical Informatics Association, the New York Academy of Medicine and the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics, as well as a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Service. He serves on the ABPM Clinical Informatics Sub-board that writes the board exam in clinical informatics.

Under his leadership, Biomedical Informatics has become a robust and highly collaborative department at UB, enhancing the research efforts of many other disciplines. He has developed and expanded a fellowship in clinical informatics — approved by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education — that attracts top candidates from across the U.S. In addition, he was awarded an NIH T15 training grant to support PhD students and fellows toward full-time research careers.

Elkin joined UB in 2013 after holding professorships at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine.