Maryam Zolnoori, PhD is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University School of Nursing with training in Biomedical Informatics. She has authored 55 peer-reviewed publications—35 as first or senior author—in leading journals including the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, and Nature Digital Medicine. Her work sits at the intersection of clinical informatics, AI, and health equity, with a focus on speech as a scalable biomarker for cognitive health.

Dr. Zolnoori’s honors include recognition from the FDA Center of Excellence in Regulatory Science and Innovation and an Intramural Research Training Award from the National Library of Medicine at the NIH. She has also been recognized by Columbia’s Center of Artificial Intelligence Technology in collaboration with Amazon for pioneering work that uses speech data to develop risk identification models.

Supported by the NIA K99/R00, the NIA a2-Collective for AI Technology in Aging, and Columbia’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Alzheimer’s Disease Disparities (CIRAD), Dr. Zolnoori leads multidisciplinary collaborations to advance earlier detection of mild cognitive impairment and address disparities among racially and ethnically diverse populations. Her group develops explainable, clinically grounded models and prototypes for integration into care settings—such as home healthcare—to support equitable screening and follow-up. She and her team received Social Recognition Awards in both Phase 2 and Phase 3 of the National Institute on Aging (NIA) PREPARE Challenge, reflecting the innovation and real-world promise of her speech-based approaches.