Professor or Associate Professor without Tenure and Chief Data Officer (CDO)

Position Overview

School / Campus / College: School of Medicine

Organization: Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education

Title: Professor or Associate Professor without Tenure and Chief Data Officer (CDO)

Position Details

Position Description

The Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education (BIME) at the University of Washington (UW) is looking for a full-time faculty at the Professor Without Tenure (Job Code 0111) or Associate Professor Without Tenure (Job Code 0112) levels with an anticipated start date as early as March 1, 2026. The new faculty will serve as UW Medicine Chief Data Officer (CDO) and join our current faculty and students in growing both the scholarship and practice/service aspects of our informatics data, analytics and related AI programs. The effort will be distributed across the following areas: ~30% FTE maintaining an independent research program, ~ 70% FTE serving as CDO for UW Medicine. Optional Clinical Practice is available (up to 10%): candidates would be appointed to the appropriate clinical department, such as Medicine, Surgery, Family Medicine, Pediatrics, or other appropriate clinical department, with a joint appointment in BIME. This faculty position works closely with eleven other BIME faculty who also engage in operational roles within UW Medicine IT Services (UWM ITS) in areas of clinical informatics, analytics, and clinical/translational research informatics.

Scholarship, Practice and Teaching Context: University of Washington faculty engage in teaching, research and service. Overall, the position is envisioned as ~70% FTE practice of data/analytics/AI and ~30% FTE between grant funded scholarship. Teaching roles are envisioned to include guest lectures and seminars, as well as advising biomedical informatics graduate students and postdocs.  

Research and practice activities will build on existing data, analytics, text mining and AI scholarship and practice in the context of a) UWM ITS infrastructure which includes the Epic Cogito analytics stack, participation in Epic Cosmos and a 30+ year longitudinal UW Medicine Enterprise Data Warehouse which is updated daily (tiered bronze, silver, gold type architecture), b) the UWM federated analytics model (20+ UWM ITS analysts, 80+ UWM affiliated developers), c) the analytics infrastructure and data services team (~70 FTE), d) the UW CTSA (the Institute of Translational Health Sciences) and UWM Research IT groups, e) our clinical computing operations group (UW Medicine Information Technology Services, UWM ITS), the Institute for Medical Data Science, g) the ongoing research and educational programs in the BIME department.  

 

UW Medicine Chief Data Officer Role: The Chief Data Officer (CDO) serves as the senior executive leader responsible for advancing UW Medicine’s enterprise analytics, data governance, data integration and artificial intelligence strategy. This role ensures that UW Medicine’s extensive data assets are leveraged to drive strategic decision-making, operational excellence, patient-centered care innovation, research, and education. As the institutional leader for data and AI, the CDO defines the vision for a data-driven organization, ensuring that actionable insights directly support UW Medicine’s mission of improving the health of the public. The CDO oversees the healthcare data and analytics group within UW Medicine IT Services, providing executive and technical leadership for data warehousing, reporting, decision support, AI/ML systems, and advanced analytics capabilities. The CDO directs a high-performing IT analytics organization of approximately 70 FTEs, including the Director of Analytics, managers, and technical leadership staff. The position partners closely with the CIO, UW Medicine executive leadership, clinical and research faculty and stakeholders (including the Chief Research Information Officer) to ensure that analytics and AI investments around analytics align with and support the strategic initiatives of the organization and yield measurable improvements in quality, safety, performance, innovation and discovery. 

 

CDO Key Responsibilities 

 

Strategic Responsibilities 

  • Enterprise Analytics Leadership: Shape and execute an enterprise-wide strategy for data, analytics, and AI using or supporting analytics that anticipates and meets organizational customer needs, enable evidence-based decision-making, and aligns with UW Medicine’s mission, strategic plan. Enable UW Medicine to easily generate and use trusted data to improve health via actionable information.  
  • Stakeholder Value Creation: Serve as an executive partner to clinical, research, operational, and educational leaders to identify key performance questions, deliver analytic insights, and translate data into measurable institutional impact. Establish clear frameworks for analytics prioritization, governance, and performance measurement in partnership with stakeholders across the organization. 
  • Strategic Planning: Lead the development of the next multi-year strategic plan for data, analytics, and AI (particularly as used by and depending on analytics) — integrating governance and technology modernization to strengthen UW Medicine’s position as a national leader in healthcare analytics 
  • Innovation & Advanced Analytics: Guide the design, deployment and evaluation of advanced analytics, machine learning, and related generative AI capabilities that enhance clinical and operational decision-making, population health management, clinical/translational research, and education. Participate in the Innovation Core executive governance.  

 

Collaboration & External Engagement:  

  • Foster partnerships around analytics for clinical care, operations, research and education across UW Medicine entities (Harborview, UW Medical Center Montlake and Northwest, UW Primary Care, UW Physicians, School of Medicine, Airlift Northwest, and other affiliates) and external clinical and research partners. Enable secure, compliant, ethical data sharing for participation in multi-institutional analytics and analytics related AI collaborations. Key executive stakeholders include but are not limited to the Dean of the School of Medicine who is also CEO of UW Medicine, the President, UW Medicine Hospitals & Clinics, the Executive Vice Dean, UW School of Medicine, the UW Medicine Chief Medical Officer, the UW Medicine Chief Quality Officer and the UW Medicine Chief Finance Officer.  

 

Operational Responsibilities 

  • Analytics Program Oversight: Lead major IT analytics and infrastructure programs, including Epic Cogito, Cosmos, the Enterprise Data Warehouse (DAWG), data archiving, cloud modernization initiatives, and customer service improvements. 
  • Population Health Analytics: Enable analytics for health equity, community health outreach, and population health initiatives through curated data sets] 
  • Enterprise Data Stewardship, Governance & Compliance: Chair or co-chair enterprise data governance and AI oversight committees. Serve as the accountable authority for institutional data integrity, quality, standardization, interoperability, and compliance. Ensure data accuracy, security, and privacy. Ensure that all analytics and AI activities align with institutional policy, federal regulations, and ethical standards (e.g. HIPAA, FERPA).  Champion ethical AI through transparency frameworks.  
  • Team and Talent Development: Build and sustain a high-performing analytics organization that attracts and retains top data, AI, customer service, and engineering talent. Foster a collaborative, mission-driven culture of innovation, learning, and accountability.  
  • Fiscal Management: Develop and manage capital and operating budgets for analytics and analytics related AI programs. Direct investments in data platforms, analytic tools, and workforce development to maximize institutional ROI. 
  • Reporting Structure: The CDO reports a) academically to the Chair of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education (BIME) and b) operationally to the Chief Information Officer (CIO) with dotted-line accountability to the UW Medicine and School of Medicine executive leadership (i. President, UW Medicine Hospitals & Clinics, ii. Executive Vice Dean, UW School of Medicine). 
  • Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education: The department is seeking multidisciplinary faculty with backgrounds in foundational and/or applied biomedical informatics research who are interested in informatics scholarship, teaching and practice in a highly collaborative academic setting. We are seeking candidates with an understanding of the needs of the UW Medicine research, teaching and practice community as well as what it takes to run an IT service line. The Department consists of over 25 core faculty and over 50 extended faculty representing 27 departments across the University engaged in a broad range of foundational and applied biomedical informatics research, as well as scholarship and practice activities around medical education. In addition to an active informatics research program, the Department faculty are responsible for the operation, evaluation and refinement of the Biomedical Informatics research training programs (MS, PhD, Postdoc), the joint (with School of Nursing) applied MS in Clinical Informatics and Patient Centered Technologies (CIPCT), and the joint (with the Department of Family Medicine) ACGME accredited clinical informatics fellowship led by BIME. The CIPCT program is a fully on-line program that forms the core of the didactic component of our clinical informatics fellowship. Where appropriate, our faculty aim to translate our foundational and applied scholarship into practice at the UW and partner institutions within our operational clinical, analytics and research computing groups. It is expected that new faculty will engage in a similar range of activities including informatics research, teaching, and the practice of research informatics. 

Salary

The base salary range for this position will be $16,594 to $43,750 per month (199K-525K annually) for a 12 month appointment, commensurate with experience and qualifications, or as mandated by a U.S. Department of Labor prevailing wage determination. 

Qualifications

Required Qualifications 

  • Candidates must have a PhD (or foreign equivalent) in biomedical informatics or another relevant discipline (e.g. Data Science, Computer Science). An MD (or foreign equivalent) with relevant significant formal biomedical informatics-related training, scholarship, and practice is also acceptable. 
  • This position is not eligible for visa sponsorship 
  • Candidates must have a grant funded research portfolio relevant broadly to data science, analytics and/or artificial intelligence. Examples of relevant research areas include one or more of the following (but are not limited to): data science, database research, data integration, data modelling, data visualization, knowledge representation, advanced machine learning and data analytics approaches, artificial intelligence, generative AI, large language models, “big data”, eScience 
  • Candidates must also have at least 5 years of documented experience with the practice of data, analytics and/or operational AI related to analytics (e.g. management of large-scale, enterprise data warehouses, data governance and security, delivery of data services for operations and research, operational AI systems, generative AI, large language models). This experience should include working across academic, research and clinical and operational sides of a health care system and communicating with a wide range of leadership and stakeholders in data and analytics (health system, clinicians, researchers, educators). 
  • Candidates must have at least two years of documented leadership experience in operational data, analytics and/or operational analytics related AI in support of the clinical, research and educational missions of an academic medical center and school of medicine (e.g. Chief Data Officer, Chief Analytics Officer).  

Other positive factors for consideration 

  • Ideally, candidates will have 10 years of demonstrated analytics IT leadership (e.g. Chief Data Officer, Chief Analytics Officer). 
  • Highly desirable expertise in biomedical data science, machine learning, biomedical artificial intelligence, and/or large language models and generative AI systems (particularly those needing or supporting analytics). 
  • Ideally candidates will demonstrate having led a team to develop and deliver necessary and forward-thinking data and analytics IT services. 
  • Other welcomed attributes include non-informatics research experience, strong computing expertise, and a track record of multidisciplinary collaboration. 
  • Other desired attributes include a thorough understanding of analytics in a complex clinical environment 
  • Experience teaching informatics and/or data science and/or health AI to diverse audiences, including graduate students and an interest in educational theories are welcomed attributes. 
  • Experience mentoring and/or teaching MS, PhD and postdoc students in the biomedical informatics and/or data science and/or health AI domain is a welcomed attribute. 

Instructions

Interested applicants should submit the following: 

  • Letter of Intent/Personal Statement – highlighting your interests, background, practical experience and career goals pertaining specifically to your own research goals; data/analytics/AI leadership and the CDO role 
  • Teaching Statement – this should include your teaching interests, experiences and teaching philosophy 
  • Diversity Statement – this should include your experiences with diversity in training, professional work, previous teaching, and/or in service, and describe your potential to foster diversity in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education and the field. 
  • Your CV 
  • List of References – contact information for three reference letter writers 

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

The University of Washington is committed to fostering an inclusive, respectful and welcoming community for all. 

As an equal opportunity employer, the University considers applicants for employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, national origin, citizenship, sex, pregnancy, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, disability, or veteran status consistent with UW Executive Order No. 81.

Benefits Information

A summary of benefits associated with this title/rank can be found at https://hr.uw.edu/benefits/benefits-orientation/benefit-summary-pdfs/. Appointees solely employed and paid directly by a non-UW entity are not UW employees and are not eligible for UW or Washington State employee benefits

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Disability Services

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