Dr. Clifford Joins ACCM as Inaugural Director of Perioperative and Critical Care Data Science & AI

We are delighted to announce that Dr. Gari D. Clifford has joined the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine as Professor. Dr. Clifford will hold a dual appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Whiting School of Engineering, with ACCM serving as his primary and administrative home.

Dr. Clifford will serve as our inaugural Director of Perioperative and Critical Care Data Science & AI. In this role, he will define and lead the department’s scientific agenda in artificial intelligence and advanced analytics, developing methods that draw on multimodal clinical data, including physiologic waveforms, imaging, audio and video, and the electronic health record, and driving the validation and deployment of AI-enabled tools in our operating rooms, ICUs, and procedural areas. He will also lead our departmental use of platforms such as PMAP and SickBay, build center-level research programs, and mentor faculty and trainees in perioperative and critical care data science.

In parallel, Dr. Clifford will serve as Executive Director for Translational Biomedical Data Science, a University-level role reporting jointly to ACCM and BME. This position is designed to bridge engineering innovation and perioperative and critical care clinical science, moving discoveries from proof-of-concept to validated clinical deployment, building cross-school research teams, and aligning the data infrastructure and governance that make that translation possible.

Dr. Clifford comes to us from Emory University, where he serves as Professor and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics, Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Emory and Georgia Tech, and Director of Informatics for the Georgia CTSA. He trained in physics at Exeter and Southampton and completed his DPhil in Biomedical Engineering and AI at the University of Oxford. He spent seven years at MIT, where he led the engineering effort behind MIMIC, the world’s largest open-access ICU database, before returning to Oxford as Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Healthcare Innovation. He directs the George B. Moody PhysioNet Challenges, is a Fellow of the IEEE, and has taken three healthcare products through full FDA approval. He has mentored more than 60 graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and engineers, ten of whom now hold faculty positions at institutions including Harvard, Oxford, UCSD, and the Technion.