Salah Al-Zaiti

PhD, RN, ANP-BC, FAHA
Professor
Vice Chair of Research
Acute & Tertiary Care

Profile

Dr. Al-Zaiti has 15 years of experience as a clinician, scientist, innovator, and entrepreneur. His broad research interests lie at the intersection of cardiovascular disease, biomedical informatics, and machine learning. Dr. Al-Zaiti’s academic career to date has focused on the biomedical modeling and phenotyping of physiological signals in patients with coronary artery disease, myocardial infarction, heart failure, and cardiomyopathy. He has special interest in novel ECG signatures of cardiac ischemia (US Patent # 10820822).

Dr. Al-Zaiti currently leads two trials at UPMC that focus on: (1) developing and deploying machine-learning-based clinical decision support tools to triage patients with chest pain at the emergency department (R01HL137761); and (2) building and deploying an intelligent alerting system to predict hemodynamic instability in step-down units in real-time, including designing and testing a clinician-facing graphical user interface (R01NR013912).

Dr. Al-Zaiti has been very productive academically with nearly 100 scholarly publications in peer-reviewed journals and 50 scientific presentations (Google Scholar). Dr. Al-Zaiti has helped develop the 2020 AHA guidelines for preventing and mitigating the risk of exercise-related adverse cardiac events.

Teaching

NUR 3287 Research Design & Methods (core PhD course)

NUR 3072 Introduction to Machine Learning in Healthcare (elective graduate course)

Service

Dr. Al-Zaiti holds leadership roles at various national and international societies, including ISCE Board of Directors and the AHA Research Mentoring Committee. He currently serves on the Editorial Boards at Journal of Electrocardiology, Heart & Lung, and the American Journal of Critical Care. Dr. Al-Zaiti has been heavily involved in mentoring pre and postdoctoral trainees, supervising the thesis and dissertation of more than 10 scholars, including sponsoring two F31 and one RWJF students.