UB Distinguished Professor
The Office of the Provost created the rank of UB Distinguished Professor to honor full professors who have achieved national or international recognition as experts in their fields of study. UB Distinguished Professors are members of the faculty who have been full professors for a minimum of five years with a demonstrated record of excellence in artistic or scholarly contributions.
2020-21 Honorees
Peter L. Elkin
Department of Biomedical Informatics
Professor and chair of biomedical informatics and professor of internal medicine, Peter Elkin, MD, is an internationally recognized expert in biomedical informatics and applied ontology, including natural language processing and artificial intelligence. A creative force in his field, among other innovations, Dr. Elkin developed a natural language processor for medicine and helped develop and maintain one of the first electronic health records in the nation. He was one of the leaders in developing the field of clinical informatics. Under his leadership, biomedical informatics has become a robust, highly collaborative department, and the fellowship in clinical informatics that he developed attracts top candidates from across the U.S. Dr. Elkin currently has seven federal and National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants and serves as the informatics core director for UB’s NIH Clinical and Translational Science Award.