Adela Grando, Ph.D.

Maria Adela Grando, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center and a member of its Division of Hospital Medicine. She serves as Director of Health Informatics Research and Deputy Learning Health Officer.

Dr. Grando holds a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in computer science from Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto in Argentina. She earned her doctorate in formal languages and applications from Rovira i Virgili University in Spain. She subsequently conducted postdoctoral research in the United Kingdom through a Cancer Research UK project involving the University of Oxford, the University of Edinburgh, and University College London, followed by postdoctoral research in the Division of Biomedical Informatics at the University of California, San Diego.

Prior to joining the UT Southwestern faculty in 2026, Dr. Grando was a tenured Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Arizona State University, where she also served as Director of Research Education in the College of Health Solutions. Her previous appointments include an adjunct faculty position at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and a role as Informatics Lead and core faculty member for the Clinical Informatics Fellowship at HonorHealth.

Dr. Grando’s research program focuses on clinical informatics, particularly patient-centered technologies, clinical decision support, human-centered artificial intelligence, and the responsible use and sharing of health data. Her work combines the development of informatics tools with the study of how patients and healthcare professionals use, understand, and make decisions about health information.

A major emphasis of her research has been giving patients greater control over sensitive health information while enabling appropriate data exchange for clinical care and research. As principal investigator of the National Institute of Mental Health-funded My Data Choices project, she studied the data-sharing preferences of people with behavioral health conditions and developed an informed-consent approach to support those choices. Her subsequent research has examined patient and clinician perspectives on the sensitivity of medical records, granular data-sharing controls, consent standards, and technology for segmenting sensitive data.

Dr. Grando has extended this work to substance use disorder through the National Institute on Drug Abuse-funded SHARES project, for which she serves as principal investigator. The project examines challenges surrounding the sharing of substance use disorder information and the feasibility of automated data segmentation to improve interoperability and care. Her publications in this area have addressed patient perspectives on privacy, trust, and equity; healthcare professional perspectives on data sharing; and the use of FHIR-based technology for granular segmentation of sensitive health information.

Another area of her research applies patient-centered decision support and digital health technologies to chronic disease management. Her work in type 1 diabetes has included mobile applications and personalized decision-support tools designed to incorporate patient preferences and patient-generated data into insulin dosing and self-management. More recent projects have investigated machine learning using mobile and wearable data to predict diabetes outcomes, as well as continuous ketone monitoring and patient-centered technologies for metabolic and weight management. 

As Director of Health Informatics Research, Dr. Grando is developing a health system-embedded informatics research program centered in the Clinical Informatics Center. Her work builds on her expertise in patient-centered technology, clinical decision support, responsible artificial intelligence, and health data, while promoting collaborations across clinical departments and the Peter O’Donnell Jr. School of Public Health. She also works to connect informatics research with UT Southwestern’s broader clinical environment and health system partners, with a focus on developing scalable approaches to improve care delivery, patient engagement, and health outcomes within a learning health system framework.

As Deputy Learning Health Officer in the Department of Internal Medicine, Dr. Grando applies her informatics expertise to developing Division-level quality metrics, advancing quality improvement efforts, and supporting research development and educational opportunities for faculty and trainees.

Dr. Grando is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and the American Medical Informatics Association. Her professional affiliations also include the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society.