November 16, 2022 | Erin Bluvas, bluvase@sc.edu
Health services policy and management assistant professor Chen Liang has been selected as a Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association. He will be formally inducted into the fellowship at the association’s annual meeting next spring.
Formed by the 1988 merger of three overlapping organizations, the American Medical Informatics Association works to improve health through informatics education, science and practice. The association is home to more than 5,000 informatics professionals from a diverse array of disciplines and backgrounds.
The most elite among these members are designated as fellows in recognition of their expertise in evidence-based informatics practice and their engagement as life-long learners who continuously apply informatics to improve health and health care.
“I am grateful for the opportunity to make contributions to advancing artificial intelligence in medicine,” Liang says. “I am excited to take on the most challenging research questions in health data science as my academia career continues.”
Liang has been training and conducting research in the field for more than 15 years. He first discovered informatics while studying electrical and information engineering as an undergraduate student at Soochow University. A master’s degree in psychology at the same university helped bring him closer to public health, and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Informatics (University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston) cemented his commitment to the field.
Since joining the Arnold School in 2019, Liang has been awarded $9.7 million in extramural funding. He currently leads two National Institutes of Health R21 grants – one as part of a nationwide effort to identify and characterize long COVID and another aimed at understanding HIV and COVID-19 coinfection.
With a focus on infectious diseases (particularly COVID-19), obstetrics and gynecology, Liang’s work involves developing and applying data science, informatics and artificial intelligence to help these populations. He is a faculty affiliate with the South Carolina SmartState Center for Healthcare Quality and the USC Big Data Health Science Center, where he is also a fellow.
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Chen Liang brings informatics expertise to Department of Health Services Policy and Management