The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine has appointed two Indian American professors, Shyam Visweswaran and Satdarshan “Paul” Singh Monga as chairs of Biomedical Informatics and Pharmacology and Chemical Biology departments respectively.
Visweswaran has been appointed chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics after serving as interim chair since November 2025. He is the second chair in the department’s history, following Michael J. Becich’s tenure as founding chair.
Visweswaran was the first faculty member recruited to the department in 2007. Since then, he has emerged as a national leader in applying artificial intelligence to unlock the power of large-scale health data for improving patient outcomes.
In 2025, he was appointed UPMC Professor of Biomedical Informatics. He also holds secondary appointments in the Intelligent Systems Program and the Clinical and Translational Science Institute.
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Visweswaran received his medical degree from JIPMER in India, completed a neurology residency at Boston University Medical Center, and earned his PhD in Intelligent Systems (Artificial Intelligence) from the University of Pittsburgh.
His research focuses on developing and evaluating AI methods for biomedical discovery and clinical care, with emphasis on clinical decision support, patient-specific modeling, and research data infrastructure.
Monga, named chair of the Department of Pharmacology and Chemical Biology, is a physician-scientist whose research has transformed understanding of liver biology, regeneration and disease.
A Pitt faculty member since 2001, he has served as chief and vice chair of the Division of Experimental Pathology in the Department of Pathology and founder of the Pittsburgh Liver Research Center, which achieved Digestive Disease Research Core Center status in 2019 and a successful renewal in 2024 from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.
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His research has been funded by NIH and industry since 2003. He has published 230 manuscripts and reviews in peer-reviewed journals like Hepatology, Gastroenterology, Journal of Hepatology, Cell Metabolism, Cell Reports, Cell Reports Medicine, Nature, and others.
Monga has been inducted into ASCI and AAP and received other awards. Currently, he serves as the president of the American Society of Investigative Pathology. He is also the editor-in-chief for the Seminars in Liver Disease and associate/consulting editor for Science Signaling, Annual Reviews in Pathology and JCI Insights.
Monga holds an MD from Dayanand Medical College & Hospital, University, Chandigarh, India. He did his postdoctoral fellowships in Hepatology and Molecular Biology at VA in Washington, DC and joined Pathology department at the University of Pittsburgh in 1999.