Michael Pencina, PhD

Michael Pencina, PhD
Vice Dean for Data Science; Chief Data Scientist

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As Vice Dean for Data Science, Dr. Pencina is responsible for developing and implementing quantitative science strategies as they pertain to the education and training, and laboratory, clinical science, and data science missions of the School of Medicine. Dr. Pencina is a Professor of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at Duke University and Director of Duke AI Health. Previously, he served as Director of Biostatistics at the Duke Clinical Research Institute.

Dr. Pencina is an internationally recognized authority in risk prediction model development and evaluation. Expert panels and guideline groups frequently recommend methods proposed in his research and have adopted them as the most promising new statistical tools in assessing and quantifying model performance.

Dr. Pencina is actively involved in the design, conduct and analysis of clinical studies with particular focus on novel and efficient designs and applications of machine learning for medical decision support. He interacts regularly with investigators from academic and industry institutions as well as the Food and Drug Administration. Dr. Pencina co-founded and co-chairs the Algorithm-Based Clinical Decision Support Oversight Committee of the Duke University Health System and serves as Co-Director of Duke’s Collaborative to Advance Clinical Health Equity (CACHE).

Due in large part to his research on risk prediction models, Thomson Reuters/Clarivate Analytics recognized Dr. Pencina as a Highly Cited Researcher in two fields, social sciences and clinical medicine, for the years 2014 – 2021 and social sciences in 2022.  His 400 publications in peer-reviewed journals have been cited over 111,000 times.  He serves as Deputy Editor for Statistics at JAMA-Cardiology and Associate Editor for Statistics in Medicine.

Dr. Pencina received his PhD in Mathematics and Statistics from Boston University in 2003. He holds master’s degrees from the University of Warsaw in actuarial mathematics and business culture. He joined the Duke University faculty in 2013. Dr. Pencina served as an Associate Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at Boston University and the Framingham Heart Study and as Director of Statistical Consulting at the Harvard Clinical Research Institute.

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