Elkin honored in inaugural fellows of ACTS cohort

BUFFALO, N.Y. – The Association for Clinical and Translational Science (ACTS) has honored Peter L. Elkin, MD, UB Distinguished Professor and chair of biomedical informatics at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo, with inclusion in the inaugural cohort of Fellows of ACTS (FACTS).

FACTS is a premier membership program for individuals who have made substantial contributions to and service within the clinical and translational science field.

Elkin was recognized for his pivotal role in leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and biomedical informatics for advancing translational science.

Margarita L. Dubocovich, PhD, SUNY Distinguished Professor of pharmacology and toxicology, was also honored as a member of FACTS, resulting in UB having two faculty members among the 36 individuals selected from the ACTS’s almost-6,000 members for the inaugural cohort.

Elkin, who is also a professor of medicine at the Jacobs School, was honored at the ACTS Translational Science 2026 meeting April 20-23 in Milwaukee.

“Dr. Peter Elkin’s selection as an inaugural fellow of ACTS is a powerful affirmation of his national leadership in clinical and translational science,” says Allison Brashear, MD, MBA, UB’s vice president for health sciences and dean of the Jacobs School. “His pioneering work at the intersection of biomedical informatics, artificial intelligence, and patient-centered care continues to shape the future of medicine and reflects the very best of UB’s research mission.”

“This is one of the most significant honors in clinical and translational research, reserved for those with over 10 years of service to the field and to ACTS,” Elkin says.

His research focuses on improving AI and large language models by adding to them formal semantic reasoning and by improving their ability to perform the mathematics needed for evidence-based medicine.

The evidence-based AI tool he developed and published in JAMA last year, Semantic Clinical Artificial Intelligence, outperformed other AI tools and most doctors on the Step exams.

Elkin has been working in biomedical informatics since 1981 and has been  researching health data representation since 1987. He is widely considered a pioneer in the field for his prolific research on health data representation, his work on fully automated electronic quality monitoring, efforts to standardize patient safety data, and contributions to the most accurate natural language processing software in health care.

In 2024, Elkin was elected to a three-year term on the board of directors of ACTS, which was founded to support the needs of the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) program. 

UB has received three CTSA awards — to speed the delivery of new drugs, diagnostics and medical devices to patients — from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) since 2015, totaling more than $65 million. Its most recent award in 2025 extended UB’s funding for an additional seven years.

Elkin has been active in both ACTS and the CTSA consortium for the past several years and has co-chaired the NCATS Informatics Enterprise Committee and the NCATS Quality Committee.

Earlier this year, Elkin was named editor-in-chief of the IEEE Journal of Biomedical Health Informatics (J-BHI), a leading journal publishing research advances in biomedical and health informatics.

Elkin has also held editorships with and served on the editorial boards of other leading journals. In 2024, he was named editor-in-chief of the Journal of Translational Research, an open access journal that publishes translational research on improving clinical medicine and human health, including research in basic science methods and clinical trial study designs.

Also in 2024, he was named a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s Digital Health Advisory Committee, which advises the FDA commissioner on issues related to digital health technologies (DHTs), providing relevant expertise and perspective to improve the FDA’s understanding of the benefits, risks and clinical outcomes associated with the use of DHTs

In 2022, he was granted an appointment at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in its preventive medicine program.

Elkin was also elected to the board of the Friends of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and hosted the NLM T15 Biomedical Informatics and Data Science Training Grant Conference at the Jacobs School. He was awarded a R25 grant from the NLM to train underrepresented researchers in biomedical informatics and data science.

In 2013, Elkin was among the first eight physicians nationwide to pass the certification exam in clinical informatics administered by the American Board of Preventive Medicine. Because he co-authored the written test, Elkin took a rigorous oral exam.

Among his many other career honors, Elkin was named a fellow of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics, a fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, a master of the American College of Physicians, a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, and a fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association.

Before coming to UB, he was vice president and professor of medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and director of its Center for Biomedical Informatics.