A champion for medical databases
Piyush Chaudhari earns Superior Accomplishment Award for work to make medical data research-ready
Oct. 1, 2025 — Data science professional and certified cinephile Piyush Chaudhari has watched hundreds of films, but there’s one menacing movie with a special place in his head.
You can probably guess which one — he won’t fill the bathtub because he has such a primal fear of water. Until recently he watched the 1975 hit weekly, over and over again, like the repeated phrase of the film’s theme song. Duhn, duhn. Duhn, duhn.
Combining Chaudhari’s work at UF and the film “Jaws,” a new catchphrase emerges for his collaborators: “You’re going to need a bigger database.”
An accomplished data management analyst in the University of Florida College of Medicine’s Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics, Chaudhari processes large sets of medical data and makes them suitable for researchers. His achievements earned him special recognition in 2025 as one of eight individuals at UF selected to receive the university’s gold-level Superior Accomplishment Award.
Award-winning work
Chaudhari’s mentors and colleagues agree he won the prize through exceptional commitment and timely accomplishments.
“Piyush has earned the respect of his peers through his clarity, reliability and quiet leadership, making him a driving force behind the team’s continued success,” said Jasen Kloeppel, one of his mentors and the associate chief research and technical officer for UF Health’s Integrated Data Repository, or IDR. “His contributions span complex data challenges, strategic process improvements and thoughtful support of team development.”
Additional mentor Benjamin Staley, director of the repository’s research data services, filmed a Superior Accomplishment Award nomination video about Piyush’s remarkable work ethic.
“I cannot say enough about Mr. Chaudhari’s commitment to the UF Health IDR team and dedication to high-quality work.” Staley said. “Despite the incredibly complex workload, he constantly displays exceptional clarity, competence and calm, no matter how many plates we have spinning in the air at one time.”
Perhaps Chaudhari is calm at work because it involves no water, no sharks. Or because he enjoys it so much.
“I’m just trying to help the team,” he said. “I love working with Ben, Jasen, everyone at IDR and the research teams. Overall, it’s very rewarding to do this work.”
He also collaborates closely on the big data sets available from the OneFlorida+ Clinical Research Network.
Translating big data
Like the oversized shark in “Jaws,” the scale of the IDR can be intimidating. Based in the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, it has amassed so many electronic records and data points from UF Health that it has surpassed 1 billion observational facts.
These facts represent the millions of patients and health care providers who have interacted at UF Health facilities. Centralizing the anonymous data at the repository enables users to mine it for unique scientific discoveries.
Chaudhari’s role as a translator of information helps to bridge the gap between his colleagues who are comfortable with data and the clinicians who mainly work with patients.
“The data scientists and the clinicians don’t speak the same language,” he said. “There’s lots of jargon. I’m in a very good position to work with these people and improve communication about data.”
One year ago, Chaudhari was fixing code for UF Health when he had an idea. He started tinkering with new approaches to process raw data and overcome inefficiencies. It proved its worth after nearly eight months of building a database with support from teams led by Gloria (Gigi) Lipori, M.T., M.B.A., UF Health chief information officer, and Yonghui Wu, Ph.D., chief data scientist and director of natural language processing at the Clinical and Translational Science Institute.
Huge data sets that previously took months to process can now be completed in a few days. The savings are immense.
On left: Chaudhari prefers to keep sharks in the movies or at a safe distance, such as this dry spot during a 2023 visit to Seaworld Orlando. On right: Chaudhari and his wife, Mugdha Talole, enjoy a visit to American Falls at Niagara Falls in July 2024.
Step by step
The path for Chaudhari has unfolded byte by byte.
He relocated to Gainesville, Florida, from Mumbai, India, in 2016 for a master’s degree in biostatistics. The population of his home city of Mumbai, 23 million people, is equal to all of Florida.
He chose UF because of its focus on the application of science, its affordability and because the acceptance letter arrived before the others.
After graduating in 2018, Piyush started working as a statistician for the UF Department of Epidemiology, a joint department between the College of Public Health and Health Professions and the College of Medicine.
By 2023, Chaudhari had moved to the center of the UF spiderweb of entities that process data to support health care and research. In August, he took the next step on his journey at UF: beginning a doctoral degree in biomedical informatics at the College of Medicine.
His primary goal is to make data more accessible.
True to his work ethic, Chaudhari will work full time and study full time. His mentor is Mei Lui, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics who also guides the OneFlorida+ Clinical Research Network.
With sparse free time in the foreseeable future, Chaudhari plans to listen to audiobooks and watch more classic movies. Now and again, he will return to his favorite — “Jaws” — and reaffirm his commitment to dry land.
