Pitt Nursing Associate Professor and Vice Chair of Research Dr. Salah Al-Zaiti received a prestigious Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program Award from the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board for the 2023-24 academic year to conduct research abroad. Al-Zaiti will head to Jordan as part of his award.
Dr. Al-Zaiti’s research interests lie at the intersection of cardiovascular disease, biomedical informatics, and machine learning. He has received nearly $8 million in funding through the National Institutes of Health (National Institute of Nursing Research and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute).
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).
Academically, Dr. Al-Zaiti has nearly 100 scholarly publications in peer-reviewed journals and 50 scientific presentations. He also helped develop the 2020 AHA guidelines for preventing and mitigating the risk of exercise-related adverse cardiac events.
Dr. Al-Zaiti has been recognized numerous times for his research through national, international, regional and university level awards. In 2023, he received the University of Pittsburgh’s Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award – a university-wide highest research honor. In 2020, he received a U.S. Patent (# 10820822) – Electrocardiographic identification of non-ST elevation ischemic events.
The Fulbright Program, founded in 1946, offers international academic and cultural exchange opportunities. The program provides about 9,000 grants to students and scholars annually, but only 800 benefit U.S. scholars traveling abroad. Al-Zaiti is among that select group of scholars for 2023.
According to the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, Fulbright is the world’s largest and most diverse international educational exchange program. Fulbright alums have gone on to become heads of state, judges, ambassadors, cabinet ministers, CEOs and university presidents. They include 62 Nobel Laureates, 89 Pulitzer Prize winners and 78 MacArthur Fellows and world-renowned experts in many fields across the private, public, and non-profit sectors. 400,000 Fulbrighters have participated in the program.
Program details: https://fulbrightscholars.org/us-scholar-awards#scholar