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. Pencina's work bridges the fields of data science, health care, and AI, and builds upon Duke’s national leadership in trustworthy AI.

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.

Pencina co-founded and co-chairs Duke Health's Algorithm-Based Clinical Decision Support (ABCDS) Oversight Committee and serves as co-director of Duke’s Collaborative to Advance Clinical Health Equity (CACHE). He spearheads Duke’s role as a founding partner of the Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) whose mission is to increase trustworthiness of AI by developing guidelines to drive high-quality health care through the adoption of credible, fair, and transparent health AI systems.

Pencina is an internationally recognized authority in the evaluation of AI tools and algorithms. Guideline groups rely on his work to advance best practices for the application of algorithms in clinical medicine. He is actively involved in the design, conduct, and analysis of clinical studies with a focus on novel and efficient designs and applications of machine learning for medical decision support. He interacts frequently with investigators from academic and industry institutions as well as regulatory officials from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Widely noted as an expert on risk prediction models, Dr. Pencina has authored or co-authored 400 peer-reviewed publications that have been cited over 111,000 times. Thomson Reuters/Clarivate Analytics has recognized him as a “highly cited researcher” in clinical medicine from 2014-2021 and social sciences from 2014-2022. He serves as deputy editor for statistics at JAMA-Cardiology and associate editor for Statistics in Medicine.

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.