Masoud Rouhizadeh

Masoud Rouhizadeh, Ph.D., M.Sc., M.A.

Assistant Professor; Lead, Intelligent Critical Care Center

Department: Pharmaceutical Outcomes & Policy
Business Phone: (352) 273-9397
Business Email: mrouhizadeh@ufl.edu

About Masoud Rouhizadeh

Masoud Rouhizadeh, M.A., Prof.MS., M.S., Ph.D., serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Outcomes and Policy at the University of Florida. Through the University’s AI in the Health Sciences Initiative, he plays central leadership roles as the Lead for the College of Pharmacy’s AI Task Force and as the Lead for the AI Collaboration Hub at the Intelligent Critical Care Center. Additionally, he holds an Adjunct Assistant Professor appointment within the Division of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Prior to joining UF, Dr. Rouhizadeh served on the faculty within Biomedical Informatics and Data Science and as the NLP Lead at the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He also co-founded the Johns Hopkins Center for Clinical NLP (C2NLP). Before Johns Hopkins University, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania. He obtained his Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from Oregon Health and Science University. Earlier in his career, he earned a Master’s degree in Human Language Technology from the University of Trento in Italy.

Related Links:
Additional Positions:
Lead
2024 – Current · AI Collaboration Hub, Intelligent Critical Care Center (IC3)
Lead
2023 – Current · AI Task Force, UF College of Pharmacy
Adjunct Assistant Professor
2021 – Current · Johns Hopkins University
Co-Founder
2018 – 2021 · Johns Hopkins Center for Clinical NLP (C2NLP)
Faculty Instructor
2017 – 2021 · Biomedical Informatics and Data Science, Johns Hopkins Medicine
NLP Lead
2017 – 2021 · Institute for Clinical and Translational Research, Johns Hopkins Medicine
NLP Specialist
2017 – 2021 · Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP), Johns Hopkins School of Engineering

Teaching Profile

Courses Taught
2022-2024
PHA6265 Introduction to Pharmaceutical Outcomes and Policy I
2022-2024
PHA6910 Supervised Research
2023-2024
PHA6241 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence in Pharmacy
2023-2024
PHA6805 Applied Data Interpretation and Reporting of Findings in Pharmacy
2023-2024
PHA6935 Selected Topics in Pharmacy
2024
PHA7979 Advanced Research
Teaching Philosophy
In addition to deep conceptual understanding and critical thinking, I believe students should have the ability to independently grasp new materials, effectively utilize them in practice, and constantly adapt to evolving environments, especially in an emerging field like AI. My teaching philosophy is to assign a central role to students in their training and exercises, whereas my responsibility as an instructor would be guiding them along and bridge any knowledge or skill gaps. Specifically, my teaching approach involves (a) encouraging students’ dynamic engagement in class activities, (b) integrating empirical and pragmatic examples with the theoretical content in the course materials, (c) offering students opportunities to exercise and endeavor, and (d) regularly evaluating their competence and performance and provide frequent feedback.

Research Profile

Supported by federal grants and contracts from agencies including the CDC, NIA, NIMHD, FDA, NIDA, and PCORI, Dr. Rouhizadeh’s research integrates artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to advance innovations in health sciences using real-world data (RWD). He leverages AI/NLP solutions drawing on diverse sources of RWD to drive targeted innovations in three interconnected areas:

1) Enhancing patient phenotyping and clinical concept extraction from both structured and unstructured electronic health records to improve clinical decision support, precision medicine, and patient care;

2) Developing computational models to identify and understand social and behavioral determinants of health, their implications for substance use, mental health outcomes, and overall population health;

3) Investigating linguistic markers indicative of neurological conditions, such as Alzheimer’s disease, related dementias, and autism spectrum disorder, to advance early detection and intervention.

His key accomplishments in this field involve integrating diverse RWD sources, such as unstructured clinical narratives, diagnosis and procedure codes, questionnaires, and insurance claims. This integration enables several critical tasks: extracting clinical concepts (including medication details, signs and symptoms, diagnoses, substance use, mental health outcomes, and social determinants of health); identifying contextual modifiers like history, negation, severity, and duration; creating computable patient-level phenotypes by combining these data sources; and conducting comprehensive analyses for cohort and case-control studies, risk assessment, predictive modeling, and developing clinical decision support systems.

Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID)

0000-0002-9006-6112

Areas of Interest
  • AI Applications in Healthcare
  • AI Applications in Mental Health
  • AI-based Analysis of Cognitive and Language Impairments
  • Clinical Natural Language Processing
  • Identifying Social and Behavioral Determinants of Health from EHR

Publications

2023
1005-P: Developing a Machine-Learning–Based Prediction Model for Diabetes Duration Using Information from Electronic Health Records
Diabetes. 72(Supplement_1)
2023
A Natural Language Processing Algorithm for Classifying Suicidal Behaviors in Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementia Patients: Development and Validation Using Electronic Health Records Data.
medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences. [DOI] 10.1101/2023.07.21.23292976. [PMID] 37546764.
2023
A risk identification model for detection of patients at risk of antidepressant discontinuation.
Frontiers in artificial intelligence. 6 [DOI] 10.3389/frai.2023.1229609. [PMID] 37693012.
2023
An open natural language processing (NLP) framework for EHR-based clinical research: a case demonstration using the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C)
Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 30(12):2036-2040 [DOI] 10.1093/jamia/ocad134. [PMID] 37555837.
2023
Application of natural language processing to identify social needs from patient medical notes: development and assessment of a scalable, performant, and rule-based model in an integrated healthcare delivery system.
JAMIA open. 6(4) [DOI] 10.1093/jamiaopen/ooad085. [PMID] 37799347.
2023
Developing and validating a natural language processing algorithm to extract preoperative cannabis use status documentation from unstructured narrative clinical notes.
Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA. 30(8):1418-1428 [DOI] 10.1093/jamia/ocad080. [PMID] 37178155.
2023
Identifying Suicidal Behaviors in Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementia Patients: Development of a Natural Language Processing Algorithm Using Electronic Health Records Data
Pre Print.
2023
Representing and utilizing clinical textual data for real world studies: An OHDSI approach.
Journal of biomedical informatics. 142 [DOI] 10.1016/j.jbi.2023.104343. [PMID] 36935011.
2023
Understanding the Circumstances of Pediatric Fall Injuries: A Machine Learning Analysis of NEISS Narratives
Injury Prevention. 29(5):384-388 [DOI] 10.1136/ip-2023-044858. [PMID] 37399309.
2022
Development and assessment of a natural language processing model to identify residential instability in electronic health records’ unstructured data: a comparison of 3 integrated healthcare delivery systems
JAMIA open. 5(1)
2022
Identification of Prediabetes Discussions in Unstructured Clinical Documentation: Validation of a Natural Language Processing Algorithm
JMIR Medical Informatics. 10(2) [DOI] 10.2196/29803. [PMID] 35200154.
2022
Suicidal Ideation and Suicide-Attempt-Related Hospitalizations among People with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and AD-Related Dementias in the United States during 2016–2018
Journal of Clinical Medicine. 11(4) [DOI] 10.3390/jcm11040943. [PMID] 35207214.
2021
A Pilot Study to Improve the Use of Electronic Health Records for Identification of Patients with Social Determinants of Health Challenges: A Collaboration of Johns Hopkins Health System and Kaiser Permanente
Health Services Research. 56
2021
An Open Natural Language Processing Development Framework for EHR-based Clinical Research: A case demonstration using the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C)
arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.10780.
2021
Analysis of Primary Care Provider Electronic Health Record Notes for Discussions of Prediabetes Using Natural Language Processing Methods.
Journal of general internal medicine. [DOI] 10.1007/s11606-020-06400-1. [PMID] 33469758.
2021
Assessing the Impact of Social Needs and Social Determinants of Health on Health Care Utilization: Using Patient- and Community-Level Data.
Population health management. 24(2):222-230 [DOI] 10.1089/pop.2020.0043. [PMID] 32598228.
2021
COVID-19 SignSym: a fast adaptation of a general clinical NLP tool to identify and normalize COVID-19 signs and symptoms to OMOP common data model.
Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA. 28(6):1275-1283 [DOI] 10.1093/jamia/ocab015. [PMID] 33674830.
2021
Measuring the Value of a Practical Text Mining Approach to Identify Patients With Housing Issues in the Free-Text Notes in Electronic Health Record: Findings of a Retrospective Cohort Study.
Frontiers in public health. 9 [DOI] 10.3389/fpubh.2021.697501. [PMID] 34513783.
2021
Patient Trajectories Among Persons Hospitalized for COVID-19
Annals of Internal Medicine. 174(1):33-41 [DOI] 10.7326/m20-3905.
2020
842-P: Analysis of Primary Care Provider (PCP) EHR Notes for Discussions of Prediabetes Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) Methods
Diabetes. 69(Supplement\_1)
2020
COVID-19 SignSym: a fast adaptation of a general clinical NLP tool to identify and normalize COVID-19 signs and symptoms to OMOP common data model.
ArXiv. [PMID] 32908948.
2020
Patient trajectories and risk factors for severe outcomes among persons hospitalized for COVID-19 in the Maryland/DC region
medRxiv.
2019
Assessing the Availability of Data on Social and Behavioral Determinants in Structured and Unstructured Electronic Health Records: A Retrospective Analysis of a Multilevel Health Care System
JMIR Medical Informatics. 7(3) [DOI] 10.2196/13802. [PMID] 31376277.
2019
Language impairment in adults with end-stage liver disease: application of natural language processing towards patient-generated health records.
NPJ digital medicine. 2 [DOI] 10.1038/s41746-019-0179-9. [PMID] 31701020.
2019
Phenotyping of clinical notes with improved document classification models using contextualized neural language models
arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.13664.
2019
Tu1587–Language Impairment in Adults with End-Stage Liver Disease: A Novel Application of Tools from Natural Language Processing
Gastroenterology. 156(6)
2019
Use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to Identify Neurocognitive Deficits in End-Stage Liver Disease
American Journal of Transplantation. 19
2018
A Guide to Using Data From Johns Hopkins Epic Electronic Health Record for Behavioral, Social and Systems Science Research
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Medical Institute.
2018
A rule-based approach to determining pregnancy timeframe from contextual social media postings
International Conference on Digital Health.
2018
Homicidal and suicidal ideation as a chief complaint: considering the influence of news events using a large, de-identified electronic medical record dataset
Society for Prevention Research 26th Annual Meeting .
2018
Identifying locus of control in social media language
EMNLP 2018.
2018
Modeling and visualizing locus of control with facebook language
AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM-18).
2017
Assessing objective recommendation quality through political forecasting
EMNLP 2017.
2017
Deriving verb predicates by clustering verbs with arguments
arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.00416.
2017
Detecting personal medication intake in Twitter: an annotated corpus and baseline classification system
BioNLP 2017.
2016
Using Syntactic and Semantic Context to Explore Psychodemographic Differences in Self-reference
EMNLP 2016.
2015
Computational analysis of language use in autism
Oregon Health and Science University.
2015
Computational Analysis of Restrictive and Repetitive Behavior in Language Samples of Children with Autism
International Society for Autism Research (IMFAR) .
2015
Measuring idiosyncratic interests in children with autism.
Proceedings of the conference. Association for Computational Linguistics. Meeting. 2015:212-217 [PMID] 29217874.
2015
Similarity Measures for Quantifying Restrictive and Repetitive Behavior in Conversations of Autistic Children.
Proceedings of the conference. Association for Computational Linguistics. North American Chapter. Meeting. 2015:117-123 [PMID] 28691123.
2014
Children’s Differing Patterns of Discourse Marker Use in ASD and Typical Development
International Society for Autism Research (IMFAR) .
2014
COMPUTATIONAL ANALYSIS OF TRAJECTORIES OF LINGUISTIC DEVELOPMENT IN AUTISM.
SLT … : … IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology : proceedings. IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology. 2014:266-271 [DOI] 10.1109/SLT.2014.7078585. [PMID] 29057398.
2014
Detecting linguistic idiosyncratic interests in autism using distributional semantic models
CLPsych 2014.
2014
Discourse Marker Use in ASD and Typical Development
Pacific Northwest NLP Workshop.
2013
Collecting Semantic Information for Locations in the Knowledge Resource of a Text-to-Scene Conversion System
Oregon Health and Science University.
2013
Distributional semantic models for the evaluation of disordered language.
Proceedings of the conference. Association for Computational Linguistics. North American Chapter. Meeting. 2013:709-714 [PMID] 25419547.
2012
Annotation tools and knowledge representation for a text-to-scene system
COLING 2012.
2012
Automatic detection of pragmatic deficits in children with autism
Child, Computer, and Interaction (WOCCI). 2012
2012
Automatic detection of pragmatic deficits in children with autism.
The … Workshop on Child, Computer and Interaction. 2012:1-6 [PMID] 28691126.
2012
Collecting Spatial Information for Locations in Text-to-Scene Systems
Pacific Northwest NLP Workshop.
2012
Collecting Spatial Information for Locations in Text-to-Scene Systems
Pacific Northwest NLP Workshop.
2012
Compound verbs in persian wordnet
International Journal of Lexicography. 25(1)
2011
An Overview of Text-to-Scene Conversion Systems
Center for Spoken Language Understanding | OHSU / OGI. (10.13140/RG.2.2.12488.96008/2)
2011
Collecting semantic information for locations in the scenario-based lexical knowledge resource of a text-to-scene conversion system
Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Volume 6884
2011
Collecting spatial information for locations in a text-to-scene conversion system
Computational Models for Spatial Languages (CogSci).
2010
Data collection and normalization for building the Scenario-Based Lexical Knowledge Resource of a text-to-scene conversion system
Semantic Media Adaptation and Personalization at CogSci.
2010
Developing the Persian WordNet of verbs: Issues of compound verbs and building the editor
Global WordNet Conference.
2008
SBUQA question answering system
Communications in Computer and Information Science. Volume 6
2008
Using WordNet in Extracting the Final Answer from Retrieved Documents in a Question Answering System
Global WordNet Conference.
2007
Building a WordNet for Persian verbs
Global WordNet Conference.
2007
Designing Persian Verbs WordNet
Iranian Conference on Linguistics.

Grants

Dec 2022 ACTIVE
Assessing Barriers and Facilitators for Participating Structured Lifestyle Intervention
Role: Co-Investigator
Funding: EMORY UNIV via CTRS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION
Sep 2022 – Dec 2022
Assessing Barriers and Facilitators for Participating Structured Lifestyle Intervention and Its Real-world Effectiveness and Cost-effectiveness among US Veterans
Role: Co-Investigator
Funding: CTRS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION
Jun 2020 ACTIVE
1Florida Alzheimers Disease Research Center
Role: Project Manager
Funding: NATL INST OF HLTH NIA

Education

Postdoctoral Training in Biomedical Informatics and Data Science
2017 · University of Pennsylvania
Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering
2015 · Oregon Health and Science University
M.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering
2013 · Oregon Health and Science University
Professional Master’s in Human Language Technology and Interfaces
2009 · University of Trento
M.A. in Linguistics
2007 · Allameh Tabatabai University

Contact Details

Phones:
Business:
(352) 273-9397
Emails:
Addresses:
Business Mailing:
PO Box 100496
GAINESVILLE FL 32610
Business Street:
1889 Museum Rd.
Room 6012
Malachowsky Hall for Data Science and IT
Gainesville FL 32611