Aize Cao, Ph.D., joined the faculty at Meharry Medical College in January 2021 and was promoted to tenured full professor in March 2025. She is a data scientist and population health informatician with extensive experience working with large-scale healthcare data analysis. Dr. Cao received her Ph.D. from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore and completed her postdoctoral training in Dr. Michael I. Miga’s lab in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Cao’s research focuses on developing and adapting machine learning methods and population health informatics to improve patient health outcome prediction.

Prior to joining Meharry, Dr. Cao served as a research assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), where she worked in the Center for Improving the Public’s Health through Informatics under the direction of Dr. Michael Matheny. Her work there focused on cirrhosis risk prediction and transforming the national Veterans Affairs (VA) electronic health records into the OMOP common data model. Before that, she was a neuroimaging analyst and contributed to neuroimaging studies of mental disease at the Vanderbilt University Institute of Imaging Science (VUIIS).