Michael J. Becich, MD, PhD

  • Associate Vice Chancellor for Informatics, Health Sciences
  • Distinguished Professor and Chair, Department of Biomedical Informatics, School of Medicine
  • Associate Director for Cancer Informatics, UPMC Hillman Cancer Center
  • Associate Director, Clinical and Translational Science Institute

Michael J. Becich, MD, PhD, is associate vice chancellor for informatics in the health sciences. As chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics, he leads the department’s efforts to use technologies to advance biomedical research and clinical care. The scope of the department’s research ranges from genomic and proteomic data mining to machine learning and biosurveillance.   

Dr. Becich’s personal research focuses on the interface between clinical informatics and bioinformatics. He has studied clinical phenotyping of patients for personalized medicine, tissue banking informatics and pathology informatics, and data sharing’s role in clinical informatics and bioinformatics. He is a current fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. He is founding president of the Pittsburgh-based Association for Pathology Informatics, which seeks to advance pathology informatics as a core subspecialty discipline in the medical community.

Dr. Becich received his BA in biology in 1977 and his MD and PhD degrees in 1984, all from Northwestern University. He completed a fellowship in urologic pathology from the University of Nebraska and both a fellowship and residency in anatomic pathology at Washington University in St. Louis.