Azra Bihorac

Physician, scientist, institution builder. I write here on what AI is asking of medicine, and what medicine must not let go of.

D major · The institutional voice

I am the R. Glenn Davis Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Surgery, Anesthesiology, and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Florida. I serve as Senior Associate Dean for Research at the UF College of Medicine and as Founding Director of the UF AI for Health Institute. My clinical training is in nephrology, critical care, neurocritical care, and biomedical informatics. I lead NIH-funded programs in perioperative and critical care medicine and in clinical AI, including work under the NIH Bridge2AI Common Fund. My peer-reviewed work appears in JAMA, Nature, Lancet Digital Health, Intensive Care Medicine, Annals of Surgery, and NEJM AI.

I am an elected member of the Association of American Physicians and the Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine of Florida.

D minor · The personal voice

I arrived in the United States in 1999 with two suitcases and a four-year-old daughter. I had done my medical training in Sarajevo and Istanbul during and after the Bosnian War. I know what it means for institutions to hold, and to fail. I know what it means to rebuild them.

Institutions are living systems. They require stewardship, adaptation, and trust. My interior homeland is language, music, and memory.

D Phrygian · The philosophical voice

I write about what happens to us in the company of other intelligence. I want to understand what grows through these encounters, what we risk losing, and what remains with us afterward. Academic medical centers have a particular responsibility: we are caring for patients while forming the people who will care for them next. The institutions we build must make room for both.

I return to Lorca’s duende: the dark, embodied intelligence that cannot be summoned or faked. Medicine is duende work: the willingness to stay with a question, to let go of an explanation that no longer holds, to recognize another person beyond the chart. We bring that intelligence into our work with AI. I ask what becomes possible when we think in its company, question what it offers, and reach farther while remaining responsible for what we do.

Nonalgorithmic has three voices. The essays ask what we are becoming. The Standing Order reads the evidence and asks what follows for the institutions that must act on it. Kidney Love lowers one note, from D major to D minor, to write about the life within and beyond the work: love, memory, the body, and the people we become through what we hold and what we must let go.