Murat Kantarcioglu has been elected a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI).
A professor and Commonwealth Cyber Initiative Faculty Fellow in the Virginia Tech Department of Computer Science and core faculty at the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics, Kantarcioglu conducts research on integrating cybersecurity, data science, and blockchain technologies to develop secure and efficient data processing and sharing mechanisms.
“I am honored to be recognized for my work in advancing health care data privacy,” Kantarcioglu said. “Working closely with colleagues at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, we have developed tools to protect sensitive health information while enabling meaningful research. Our solutions address privacy challenges in genomic data sharing and record linkage.”
Elements of this work have been adopted by the National Institutes of Health All of Us Research Program and the National Cancer Institute to support secure and responsible biomedical discovery.
“Murat’s selection as an ACMI Fellow highlights the sort of research we value most in our department: it is rigorous, collaborative, and aimed squarely at improving people’s lives,” said Christine Julien, professor and head of the Department of Computer Science. “This is a well-deserved nod to his impact across both computer science and medicine.”
Initially incorporated in 1984, The American College of Medical Informatics is a college of elected fellows within the American Medical Informatics Association. Its fellowship is one of the most prestigious recognitions in the field of biomedical and health informatics and is awarded to individuals who have demonstrated major contributions in the field, have achieved national recognition, and are committed to advancing the organization’s charitable, scientific, literary, and educational objectives.
Kantarcioglu, who joined Virginia Tech in September 2024, earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Purdue University in 2005, where he was awarded the university’s CERIAS Diamond Award for Academic Excellence. He has held affiliations as faculty associate at Harvard’s Data Privacy Lab and as visiting scholar at the RISELab at University of California, Berkeley.
His research has been funded by numerous grants from agencies that include the National Institutes of Health, Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, National Science Foundation, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Office of Naval Research, Army Research Office, and National Security Agency.
He has authored more than 180 peer-reviewed papers in top-tier venues, has served as program co-chair for prestigious national conferences in his field, and has been featured by such media as the Boston Globe and ABC News.
He is the recipient of several notable awards, including the Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award and the AMIA Homer R. Warner Award in 2014. In 2017, he received the IEEE Intelligence and Security Informatics Technical Achievement Award for his contributions to data security and privacy.
Kantarcioglu is a fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and IEEE.
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