Lucila Ohno-Machado

Timeline

1. By 1996

   From São Paulo to Stanford

   She grows up in Brazil, earns her medical degree at the University of São Paulo, and becomes one of the first residents in its new medical informatics residency. She completes a PhD in medical information sciences and computer science at Stanford University in 1996, with thesis work on neural network models for survival analysis.

2. 1997–2009

   Professor at Harvard–MIT

   In 1997, she moves to the Boston area as a professor in the Department of Radiology and the Division of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard–MIT. She holds a distinguished chair in biomedical informatics at Brigham and Women's Hospital, with faculty roles at Harvard Medical School and MIT's Health Sciences and Technology Division.

3. 2009–2022

   A new division at UC San Diego

   In 2009, she founds the Biomedical Informatics program at UC San Diego School of Medicine as founding chief of its Division of Biomedical Informatics, and it becomes a department at UC San Diego Health in 2015. As founding chair of the University of California Research eXchange (UC ReX), which starts in 2011 across the five UC medical centers, she helps build a system that searches more than 15 million de-identified patient records with one query. She resigns as division chief in November 2022 to join a new initiative with Yale University.

4. 2011–2018

   Editor of JAMIA

   In 2010, the board of the American Medical Informatics Association selects her as the new editor-in-chief of its journal, JAMIA, with a term that starts in January 2011. She writes her final editorial as editor in 2018.

5. 2012

   The GLORE federated model

   In 2012, she coauthors GLORE (Grid Binary LOgistic REgression) with Yuan Wu, Xiaoqian Jiang and Jihoon Kim in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. The method sends the computation to each site's data and produces a logistic regression model that matches one fitted on the combined data, part of her work on algorithms that build multivariate models in a federated manner while data stay local.

6. 2018

   Election to the National Academy of Medicine

   In October 2018, she is elected to the National Academy of Medicine while chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at UC San Diego Health. She also co-leads the California Precision Medicine Consortium, which manages the All of Us Research Program in California.

7. January 2023

   Joining Yale School of Medicine

   She joins Yale School of Medicine in January 2023 as inaugural chair of the Section of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science and deputy dean for biomedical informatics, with an appointment as Waldemar von Zedtwitz Professor. In this role she oversees the infrastructure related to biomedical informatics research across the academic health system.

8. As of October 2026

   Chair of Yale's informatics department

   Yale's Section of Biomedical Informatics & Data Science becomes the Department of Biomedical Informatics & Data Science, with her as inaugural chair, and its members develop the computational infrastructure to employ AI in a secure, privacy-protecting manner. In August 2026, Yale School of Medicine announces a new online Master of Health Science in Medical AI, taught by faculty from her department.