Bradley Malin, PhD

Bradley Malin, Ph.D., is the Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.  He is also the Accenture Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Biostatistics, and Computer Science at Vanderbilt University. He is Affiliated Faculty in the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society.  He is the founder and co-director of the Health Data Science (HEADS) Center and his research is in big health data analytics and the infrastructure necessary to support such investigations. Additionally, he is the founder and director of the Health Information Privacy Laboratory (HIPLab), which was established to address the growing need for data privacy research and development for the health information technology sector. His research is funded through various grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) to construct technologies that enable privacy and analytics in the context of real world organizational, political, and health information architectures. To build practical solutions, his work draws upon methodologies in computer science, biomedical science, and public policy to innovate novel computational techniques. In addition to its role as a scientific research program, he has led data privacy consultation and research for the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) network, an NIH consortium, as well as the All of Us Research Program of the NIH's Precision Medicine Initiative.  He is an appointed member of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Technical Anonymisation Group (TAG) of the European Medicines Agency.

Dr. Malin's research has made contributions to a number of health-related areas, including distributed data processing methods for medical record linkage and predictive modeling, intelligent auditing technologies to protect electronic medical records from misuse in the context of primary care, and algorithms to formally anonymize patient information disseminated for secondary research purposes. Notably, his investigations on the empirical risks to health information re-identification have been cited by the Federal Trade Commission in the Federal Register and certain privacy enhancing technologies he developed have been featured in popular media outlets and blogs, including Nature News, Scientific American, and Wired magazine. He is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI), the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI), and was honored as a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).

Dr. Malin completed his education at Carnegie Mellon University, where he received a bachelor's in biological sciences, a master's in data mining and knowledge discovery, a master's in public policy and management, and a doctorate in computer science.