Taha Kass-Hout, MD, MS

FDA Chief Health Informatics Officer and Director of the FDA Office of Health Informatics

Taha Kass-Hout, a leader in the fields of health informatics and analytics for two decades, is currently the first Chief Health Informatics Officer of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). He leads innovations, such as openFDA and precisionFDA, and is an advocate for cross-cutting regulatory science initiatives at FDA. OpenFDA is a big data cloud platform that provides open-source Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that has allowed software developers, researchers, FDA scientists, and the public to tap into adverse events, recalls, and labeling for medical products on the market. PrecisionFDA is the informatics cloud-based platform for ensuring the accuracy of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) tests by crowdsouring reference material and data and is part of President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative. Taha holds a Doctor of Medicine and a Master of Science (Biostatistics) from the University of Texas.