Dr. Maxim (Max) Topaz PhD, RN, MA is the Elizabeth Standish Gill Associate Professor of Nursing at the Columbia University Medical Center. He is also affiliated with Columbia University Data Science Institute and the Center for Home Care Policy & Research at the Visiting Nurse Service of New York. His research focuses on data science and he finds innovative ways to use the most recent technological breakthroughs, like text or data mining, to improve human health.

Dr. Topaz is one of the pioneers in applying natural language processing on data generated by nurses. His current work focuses on developing natural language processing solutions to advance clinical decision making. In the past, Dr. Topaz was involved with health policy (national and international levels), leadership (e.g. Chair of the Emerging Professionals Working Group of the International Medical Informatics Association) and health entrepreneurship. Dr. Topaz’s clinical experience is in internal and urgent medicine. He earned his PhD degree as a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and his Masters and Bachelors degrees from the University of Haifa, Israel. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard Medical School and Brigham Women’s Hospital. He served as a Senior Lecturer at the School of Nursing, University of Haifa (Israel) where he was heading a Health Information Technology Lab. He published more than sixty articles on topics related to health informatics and received numerous prestigious awards for his work.