Peter Szolovits, PhD, FACMI, is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and an associate faculty member in the MIT Institute of Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and its Harvard/MIT Health Sciences and Technology (HST) program.

He is also head of the Clinical Decision-Making Group within the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

Dr. Szolovits' research centers on the application of artificial intelligence (AI) methods to problems of medical decision making, natural language processing to extract meaningful data from clinical narratives to support translational medicine, and the design of information systems for health care institutions and patients.

He has worked on problems of diagnosis, therapy planning, execution and monitoring for various medical conditions, computational aspects of genetic counseling, controlled sharing of health information, and privacy and confidentiality issues in medical record systems.

His interests in AI include knowledge representation, qualitative reasoning and probabilistic inference. His interests in medical computing include web-based heterogeneous medical record systems, life-long personal health information systems and design of cryptographic schemes for health identifiers. He teaches classes in AI, programming languages, medical computing, medical decision making, knowledge-based systems and probabilistic inference.

Prof. Szolovits has served on journal editorial boards and as program chairman on the program committees of national conferences. He has been a founder of and consultant for several companies that apply AI to problems of commercial interest. He received his bachelor's degree in physics and his PhD in information science, both from Caltech. Prof. Szolovits was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies and is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the American College of Medical Informatics and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

He recently served as a member of the National Research Council's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board and is a member of the National Library of Medicine’s Biomedical Library and Informatics Review Committee. He is the 2013 recipient of the Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence from the American College of Medical Informatics, which is part of the American Medical Informatics Association.