Overview
Michael J. Pencina, PhD
Chief Data Scientist, Duke Health
Vice Dean for Data Science
Director, Duke AI Health
Professor, Biostatistics & Bioinformatics
Duke University School of Medicine
Michael J. Pencina, PhD, is Duke Health's chief data scientist and serves as vice dean for data science, director of Duke AI Health, and professor of biostatistics and bioinformatics at the Duke University School of Medicine. His work bridges the fields of data science, health care, and AI, contributing to Duke’s national leadership in responsible health AI.
Dr. Pencina partners with key leaders to develop data science strategies for Duke Health that span and connect academic research and clinical care. As vice dean for data science, he develops and implements quantitative science strategies to support the School of Medicine’s missions in education and training, laboratory and clinical science, and data science.
He co-founded and co-leads the national Coalition for Health AI (CHAI), a multi-stakeholder effort whose mission is to increase trustworthiness of AI by developing guidelines to drive high-quality health care through the implementation of innovative, credible, and transparent health AI systems. He serves in a leadership capacity for the Trustworthy & Responsible AI Network (TRAIN), a new organization Duke co-founded with leading health care and technology organizations to develop tools and technologies that promote the adoption of high-quality, novel, and safe health AI solutions for patient care and research. He also spearheaded establishing and co-chairs Duke Health’s Algorithm-Based Clinical Decision Support (ABCDS) Oversight Committee.
Dr. Pencina is an internationally recognized authority in the evaluation of AI algorithms. Guideline groups rely on his work to advance best practices for the application of clinical decision support tools in health delivery. He interacts frequently with investigators from academic and industry institutions as well as government officials. Since 2014, Thomson Reuters/Clarivate Analytics has regularly recognized Dr. Pencina as one of the world’s "highly cited researchers" in clinical medicine and social sciences, with more than 400 publications cited over 135,000 times. He serves as a deputy editor for statistics at JAMA-Cardiology.
Dr. Pencina joined the Duke University faculty in 2013, and served as director of biostatistics for the Duke Clinical Research Institute until 2018. Previously, he was an associate professor in the Department of Biostatistics at Boston University and the Framingham Heart Study, and director of statistical consulting at the Harvard Clinical Research Institute. He received his PhD in Mathematics and Statistics from Boston University in 2003 and holds master’s degrees from the University of Warsaw in actuarial mathematics and business culture.
Email: michael.pencina@duke.edu
Web Sites: medschool.duke.edu; aihealth.duke.edu; https://scholars.duke.edu/person/michael.pencina
Phone: 919.613.9066
Address: Duke University School of Medicine; 2424 Erwin Road, Suite 903; Durham, NC 27705
Current Appointments & Affiliations
Recent Publications
Adverse pregnancy outcomes and development of short-term cardiovascular disease risk factors.
Journal Article Am J Obstet Gynecol MFM · February 2026 BACKGROUND: There are limited data defining the rate of progression of the development of adverse pregnancy outcomes and short-term cardiovascular risk factors in a contemporary cohort. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to examine the association between adverse ... Full text Link to item CiteA federated learning framework for ethical dynamic treatment allocation across heterogeneous hospitals.
Journal Article J Biomed Inform · February 2026 OBJECTIVE: In this paper, we propose an adaptive federated learning framework to learn optimal treatments for individual hospitals that possibly serve different patient populations. The proposed framework can enable the design of more efficient treatment a ... Full text Link to item CitePragmatic Approaches to the Evaluation and Monitoring of Artificial Intelligence in Health Care: A Science Advisory From the American Heart Association.
Journal Article Circulation · December 9, 2025 The rapid development and integration of artificial intelligence (AI), including predictive, generative, and emerging agentic tools, into cardiovascular and stroke care is outpacing traditional evaluation frameworks and the generation of robust clinical ev ... Full text Link to item CiteRecent Grants
1/3 CTSA UM1 at Duke University
ResearchFaculty Member · Awarded by National Institutes of Health · 2025 - 20322/3 CTSA K12 Program at Duke University
ResearchMentor · Awarded by National Institutes of Health · 2025 - 2030Implementation partner-guided strategy to promote health equity in ICU prognostication
ResearchCo-Principal Investigator · Awarded by National Institutes of Health · 2025 - 2029View All Grants