Dr. Issam El Naqa obtained his MA degree in Biology from Washington University in St. Louis, his MS degree in Electrical Engineering/Telecommunication from University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan, and his PhD degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Illinois Institute of Technology. He is the founding chair of the Department of Machine Learning at the Moffitt Cancer Center, Tampa, FL, USA. He is an internationally recognized authority in the fields of machine learning, data analytics, and oncology outcomes modeling. He has been a member and fellow of several academic and professional societies including AAPM, IEEE, AIMBE. His research has been funded by several federal and private grants in Canada and the USA and served on national and international study sections. He acts as a peer-reviewer and editorial board member for several leading international journals in his areas of expertise. His research interests are in the areas of oncology bioinformatics, artificial intelligence, machine learning algorithms, multimodality image analysis, and treatment outcome modeling.