Alex Bui, PhD

Director, Medical & Imaging Informatics Group 
Professor, Departments of Radiological Sciences, Bioengineering & Bioinformatics 
Senior Associate Director for Informatics, Clinical & Translational Science Institute 
Senior/Associate Dean, Graduate & Postdoctoral Affairs, DGSOM/College of L&S
David Geffen Chair in Informatics
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

Dr. Bui received his PhD in Computer Science in 2000, upon which he joined the UCLA faculty and what is now known as the Medical & Imaging Informatics (MII) group. Since 2012, he has formally served as MII's Director. His research includes informatics and data science for biomedical research and healthcare in areas related to distributed information architectures and mHealth; methodological development, application, and evaluation of artificial intelligence (AI) methods, including machine and reinforcement learning; and data visualization. His work bridges contemporary computational approaches with the opportunities arising from the breadth of biomedical observations and the electronic health record (EHR), tackling the associated translational challenges.

Dr. Bui has an extensive history of leading extramurally funded research, including from multiple different National Institutes of Health (NIH) institutes (NCI, NLM, NINDS, NIBIB, NIMHD, etc.). He served as a Co-Director for the NIH Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Centers Coordination Center; Application Lead for the NSF-funded Expeditions in Computing Center for Domain-Specific Computing (CDSC), exploring cutting-edge hardware/software techniques for accelerating algorithms used in healthcare; and led the NIH-funded Los Angeles PRISMS Center, a U54 focused on mHealth informatics. Many of these efforts have set the foundation for our current progress in the development and application of computational methods in healthcare. He is presently the Director of UCLA’s Bridge2AI Coordination Center, a landmark NIH initiative to advance the use of AI/ML methods. He also serves as a PI or investigator on several informatics and AI-related projects. He is a Co-Director of the Center for AI & SMART Health; serves at the Senior Associate Director for Informatics for UCLA’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI); and as Associate Director for Medical Informatics in the Institute of Precision Health (IPH);. He also presently Co-Chairs the University of California (UC) AI Council, which helps guide use of AI methods and tools across the UC's 10 campuses.

A longstanding advocate for the next generation of scientists, alongside his research efforts, Dr. Bui is the Program Director of multiple separate NIH TL1/T15/T32s at UCLA in the areas of biomedical informatics and data science and other training-related programs. He provides leadership as a (Senior) Associate Dean for Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in the David Geffen School of Medicine and the Life Sciences Division of the College of Life Sciences at UCLA.