Alan L. Rector is a retired Professor (emeritus) of Medical Informatics in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester in the UK.

[5] Rector's research[1][6] specialty was clinical terminology,[7][8] SNOMED,[9] GRAIL,[10] OpenGALEN,[11] biomedical ontologies,[12] Artificial Intelligence in medicine,[13] the Web Ontology Language[14] and the development of the semantic web.

He provided consultancy to the NHS Information Authority, the Mayo Clinic & Hewlett-Packard and Siemens Healthcare.

He was a member of the Jisc Committee for the Support of Research, the National Cancer Research Institute Board for Bioinformatics, the Joint NHS/Higher Education Forum on Informatics, and the Board of the Academic Forum of the UK Institute for Health Informatics.

Rector reached retirement age in September 2011 but remained active in the field until 2019.