Anthony Faiola, PhD, MFA is Associate Dean of Research and Scholarship (ADR) and Professor at the University of Kentucky, College of Health Sciences. As ADR, Dr. Faiola is responsible for fostering research and scholarship productivity and aiding in the strategic direction of the college’s research mission. Dr. Faiola will explore ways to create new synergies for CHS by advancing cross-disciplinary collaboration across the UK campus and beyond. Particularly, Dr. Faiola embraces the application of new health information and data science technologies that can have a profound impact on increasing innovative forms of patient-centered care.

Outcomes of Dr. Faiola’s research include more than 120 refereed papers and extended abstracts, as well as over 100 presentations and keynotes in the U.S., Europe, Russia, India, China, and Saudi Arabia. As both principal and co-principal investigator, he has secured external funding from the National Science Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Walther Cancer Institute, and the Fulbright Institute. He has taught over 1,000 students at every level, including the advising of more than 65 MS and PhD students—with whom he has co-authored more than 40 refereed papers. Besides mentoring a diversity of students, his work with national and international graduate students has also been broad. These students now hold positions at NIH, Roche, Eli Lilly, Merek, the Mayo Clinic, Motorola Mobile Div., Yahoo, Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft.

Dr. Faiola’s personal research focuses on the cognitive and behavioral aspects of clinicians, patients, and family caregivers in their use of mobile and telehealth information technology (mHealth). He uses empirically grounded methods to inform the design and development of mHealth that support self-monitoring, communication, and a range of data collection and analytics. While his research resides at the intersection of the health and social sciences and human-centered computing, the focus is on the translational application of how mHealth data can foster healthy lifestyle behavior and rehabilitation.

At the University of Kentucky, Dr. Faiola will continue his current mHealth research by building his agenda on three recent project areas: (1) The use of non-invasive alert-systems to detect low-blood glucose hypoglycemia by extracting predictive biomarkers from human breath. The technology uses nano-sensor technology that collects and analyzes breath data, which is pushed to a mobile app for (visualization) tracking for diabetes patients. (2) A health communications HIPAA-compliant mobile system that delivers patient vitals/wellness information from the bedside to family members, as well as connects to social and mental health services. (3) A smart-glasses application that offers mobility and hands-free access to patient bedside and electronic medical record data in the ICU and other patient care spaces. Future work will include exploring the application of mHealth and other information technologies as applied to telehealth, health games, and virtual reality for health and wellness.

Dr. Faiola joined the UK College of Health Sciences as ADR on June 1, 2020. Prior to coming to the University of Kentucky, he was Professor and Head of the Department of Biomedical and Health Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and prior to UIC he was Executive Associate Dean at Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing, IUPUI. He received his master’s degrees from The Ohio State University and his PhD from Purdue University.

Faiola VitaeFaiola NIH Biosketch