Rate My Professor Peter Elkin

Peter L. Elkin, MD, MACP, FACMI, FNYAM, FAMIA, FIAHSI, is University at Buffalo Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, as well as Professor of Internal Medicine. A leader in medicine, he earned a BS cum laude from Union College in 1978 and an MD from New York Medical College in 1985. He completed his residency in Internal Medicine at Lahey Clinic and an NIH/NLM-sponsored fellowship in Biomedical Informatics at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in 1990. Additional certifications include Internal Medicine from the New York Academy of Medicine in 2012, American College of Physicians in 2009, and Biomedical Informatics from the American College of Medical Informatics in 2006. His career spans prominent institutions: at University at Buffalo since 2013 as Professor and Chair; previously at Mount Sinai School of Medicine from 2008 to 2011 as tenured Professor of Medicine, Center Director of Biomedical Informatics, Vice-Chairman of Internal Medicine, and Vice-President for Biomedical and Translational Informatics; and at Mayo Clinic from 1996 to 2008 in ascending roles from Assistant to full Professor of Internal Medicine. Elkin has worked in biomedical informatics since 1981 and health data representation since 1987, with research specializations including controlled health vocabularies, quality indicators, population health, human factors engineering, natural language processing, big data in healthcare, clinical trials recruitment via ontology and IoT, opioid epidemic analytics, and RNA editing in genetic diseases.

Elkin has published over 120 peer-reviewed articles, including key works such as 'Automated identification of postoperative complications within an electronic medical record using natural language processing' (JAMA, 2011), 'AMIA Board white paper: definition of biomedical informatics and specification of core competencies for graduate education in the discipline' (J Am Med Inform Assoc, 2012), and 'Barriers, Facilitators, and Solutions to Optimal Patient Portal and Personal Health Record Use' (AMIA Annu Symp Proc, 2017). He is primary author of the ANSI standard ASTM E2087 on Quality Indicators for Controlled Health Vocabularies, adopted as ISO TS17117. Major honors include UB Distinguished Professor (2021), Homer R. Warner Award (1998, inaugural recipient), Mayo Department of Medicine Laureate Award (2005), fellowships in the American College of Physicians (1998), American College of Medical Informatics (2006), and New York Academy of Medicine (2012), and mastership in the American College of Physicians (2009). He chairs the International Medical Informatics Association Working Group on Human Factors Engineering, was Editor of Springer's Terminology and Terminological Systems, and since 2026 serves as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics. Recent contributions include an R25 grant from the National Library of Medicine (2022), election to the Association for Clinical and Translational Science Board (2024), and studies on generative AI and semantic clinical AI tools outperforming physicians.