SAIL

Amy P. Abernethy, MD, PhD is the President of Clinical Studies Platforms at Alphabet’s Verily, where she has responsibility for the company’s Baseline program and other initiatives to support clinical trials and real-world evidence (RWE) studies.

Before joining Verily, Dr. Abernethy was Principal Deputy Commissioner and Acting Chief Information Officer of the US Food & Drug Administration. Prior roles include serving as CMO/CSO of Flatiron Health and multiple roles at Duke University, where she was Professor of Medicine.

Dr. Abernethy went to the University of Pennsylvania and then Duke University Medical School, and received her PhD from Flinders University in Australia.

Michael Abramoff, MD, PhD is the Founder and Executive Chairman of Digital Diagnostics, the autonomous AI diagnostics company which was the first in any field of medicine to get FDA authorization for an autonomous AI. In primary care, the AI system can instantaneously diagnose diabetic retinopathy and diabetic macular edema at the point of care. Dr. Abramoff’s achievements include development of the first ethical foundation for autonomous AI (2020), the first incorporation of AI into standards of care, as well as ultimately widespread payment for AI as a diagnostic service (2020). These achievements have already led to better outcomes for thousands of patients worldwide, through improved access, lower cost, and higher quality of care. As a Professor of Ophthalmology at the University of Iowa, Dr. Abramoff continues to see patients and has mentored dozens of graduate students, ophthalmology residents, and retina fellows. He currently chairs the Foundational Principles for Ophthalmic Imaging and Algorithmic Interpretation AI workgroup instigated by FDA.

Ricky Bloomfield is a physician, entrepreneur, developer, and clinical informaticist who is passionate about using technology to improve the health of all people. He joined Apple’s Health team in November 2016 as the Clinical and Health Informatics Lead where he works on products that empower patients to improve their health.

Although he’s had a lifelong interest in technology, it didn’t become truly meaningful for him until he saw the potential for mobile devices to transform care with the advent of the Apple App Store in 2008. At that point he taught himself how to write iOS apps during his Med-Peds residency and started a small software company whose apps were downloaded over 17 million times.

After residency, he joined the Duke University Health System as the Director of Mobile Technology Strategy where he began a personal mission to improve the interoperability of EHR data to empower patients and clinicians to solve healthcare’s biggest problems. This work resulted in the first implementation of a FHIR API at an Epic-based health system.

Ricky is also an avid swimmer and jazz saxophonist, and enjoys watching Marvel and Star Wars movies with his wife and 16-year old twin daughters.

Gabriel Brat is a trauma surgeon and informaticist at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Dr. Brat has a broad research focus on informatics tools to improve surgical outcomes. His interests include clinical decision support to optimize surgical opioid prescribing as well as leveraging large-scale database and machine learning models to inform surgical planning and improve outcomes. As the co-founder of a successful venture-backed machine learning and computer vision company, he now teaches health IT innovation at the medical school and mentors several digital health startups. Gabriel has an undergraduate degree in bioengineering and a graduate degree in public health and biostatistics from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He completed his medical training at Stanford University and his surgical residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Ken spent the early years of his career working across the industries of agriculture, finance, and retail, before finding a home in healthcare. Since then, he has focused on using data, analytics, and a longitudinal understanding of disease to build products and businesses that improve the healthcare system. This career spans three decades and consists of numerous leadership positions and entrepreneurial endeavors, including serving as UnitedHealth Group’s Chief Scientific Officer. Ken has founded and successfully exited several companies, including All Savers—a novel insurance product for small businesses that brings the advantages of large groups, Motion—the first pay-for-healthy-behaviors insurance program that used biosensors, Level2—the first insurance plan that combines disease-specific interventions with benefit design, and Savvysherpa—a healthcare R&D firm focused at the intersection of math, clinical science, and human connection. Today, Ken is most passionate about the linkage between cognition, behavior, biology, and chronic diseases. His efforts are aimed at exploring this linkage and harnessing it to improve health and access to healthcare, especially for those who are socio-economically challenged.

Peter J. Embí, MD, MS, FACP, FACMI, FAMIA, FIAHSI is an internationally recognized researcher, educator and leader in the field of clinical and translational research informatics, with numerous peer-reviewed publications and presentations describing his innovations in the field.

Dr. Embí serves as Professor and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics, Professor of Medicine and Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Prior to joining VUMC , he served as President and CEO of the Regenstrief Institute, Professor and Associate Dean for Informatics and Health Services Research at the Indiana University School of Medicine, Associate Director at Indiana CTSI and Vice President for Learning Health Systems at IU Health and on the faculty of the University of Cincinnati, where he was the founding director of the UC Center for Health Informatics.

Among his other leadership roles, he was the past President and Chair of the Board of Directors of AMIA and on the National Advisory Council for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).

Kadija Ferryman’s research focuses on racial health equity and digital health technologies. Dr. Ferryman is Core Faculty at the Berman Institute of Bioethics and Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Ferryman began her research career over 20 years ago as a policy researcher at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC. Dr. Ferryman received her BA in anthropology from Yale University and her PhD in anthropology from the New School for Social Research. She has published research in journals such as Journal of the American Informatics Association, Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, and Genetics in Medicine. Ferryman is an affiliate at the Data & Society Research Institute and at the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies. She also serves on the institutional review board for the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program.

Yael Garten is Director of AI/ML Data Science & Data Engineering at Apple where she leads an organization of engineers, data scientists, data visualization experts, and product managers. Her team partners with Apple’s hardware, software and services teams to measure, understand, and optimize the user experience across Apple products and services, creating powerful data-informed machine learning based product experiences. Yael is a technology business leader with 20 years of experience in data science, machine learning, consumer product strategy, natural language processing and biomedical informatics. She serves on the Board of Directors of Levi Strauss & Co.

Previously, Yael was Director of Data Science at LinkedIn. Prior to that she was a research scientist at Stanford University; her research focused on information extraction and semantic understanding of pharmacogenomic text, to enable clinicians to make better decisions. She champions data culture & data quality with a focus on privacy & ethics, and has developed organizational best practices and tools to democratize data within companies. Yael has a Biomedical Informatics PhD from Stanford University School of Medicine, an MSc from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and a BSc in Computational Biology from Bar Ilan University. She lives in California with her husband and 3 children.

Marzyeh Ghassemi is an Assistant Professor at MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Institute for Medical Engineering & Science (IMES), and a Vector Institute faculty member holding a Canadian CIFAR AI Chair and Canada Research Chair. She holds a Herman L. F. von Helmholtz Career Development Professorship, and was also named one of MIT Tech Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35. Previously, she was a Visiting Researcher with Alphabet’s Verily and an Assistant Professor at University of Toronto.

Professor Ghassemi previously served as a NeurIPS Workshop Co-Chair, and General Chair for the ACM Conference on Health, Inference and Learning. Professor Ghassemi has published across computer science and clinical venues, including NeurIPS, KDD, AAAI, MLHC, JAMIA, JMIR, JMLR, AMIA-CRI, Nature Medicine, Nature Translational Psychiatry, and Critical Care. Her work has been featured in popular press such as Fortune, MIT News, NVIDIA, and the Huffington Post.

C. William Hanson, III, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer and Vice President of the University of Pennsylvania Health System, is an internist, anesthesiologist, and intensivist. Dr. Hanson has extensive experience in medical informatics and was Visiting Professor in the Princeton University Department of Computer Science between 2002 and 2005. Dr. Hanson’s anesthetic specialty is cardiac anesthesia (cardiac surgery, thoracic surgery, lung and heart transplantation). His research using “electronic nose” technology to detect diseases such as pneumonia and sinusitis by breath analysis was featured in Scientific American. He published The Edge of Medicine: The Technology That Will Change Our Lives, a non-fiction book profiling innovations in biotechnology that are changing the delivery of medical care and the ways they’re altering the human experience. He also published Smart Medicine: How the Changing Role of Doctors Will Revolutionize Health Care, revealing the revolutionary changes sweeping through the medical community. Dr. Hanson’s research has been featured in publications including Popular Science and U.S. News and World Report. He has been a guest on NPR’s Fresh Air and featured on Discovery Channel documentaries.

Katherine Heller is a Research Scientist in the Responsible AI organization in Google Research. She leads the Context in AI Research (CAIR) group, which focuses on understanding the *context* in which are AI systems are being developed and deployed. Prior to Google, she was faculty in the Statistical Science department at Duke university, where she collaborated across many disciplines to develop and integrate multiple machine learning systems into hospitals and clinical care including: a sepsis detection system which has been integrated into the Duke University Hospital Emergency Departments, a system for detecting the likelihood of complications resulting from surgery, and a nationally released mobile study on Multiple Sclerosis. She is committed to the inclusion of all people in the development of medical technology. Before joining Google, she was at Duke University in Statistical Science, Neurobiology, Neurology, Computer Science, and Electrical and Computer Engineering. She was the recipient of an NSF CAREER award and a first round BRAIN initiative award. Katherine received her PhD from the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge and MIT.

Maia Hightower, MD, MPH, MBA is the CEO and Founder of Equality AI, and is the Sr. Director Health Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion for The University of Utah Health. She is the former Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO) at the University of Utah Health and former CMIO and Chief Population Health Officer at University of Iowa Healthcare.

Prior to joining the UUH team in March of 2019, she was the CMIO and Interim Chief Population Health Officer for The Univ. of Iowa Health Care. Dr. Hightower received her Medical Degree, as well as a Master of Public Health, from the Univ. of Rochester School of Medicine, followed by residencies in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at the Univ. of California, San Diego. She also holds an MBA from the Univ. of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Dr. Hightower’s professional interests include healthcare leadership, clinical informatics, clinical decision making and the evolution of medical care in the digital era. Her drive is to advance the work of clinicians, care teams, researchers, educators and learners by providing health information technology tools, processes, and systems needed to adapt to change and provide value to our patients, families and communities in the digital era of healthcare.

Josh C. Mandel, MD is a physician and software developer working to fuel an ecosystem of health apps with access to clinical and research data. As Chief Architect for Microsoft Healthcare, Chief Architect for SMART Health IT, and Lecturer at the Harvard Medical School Department of Biomedical Informatics, Josh works closely with the standards development community to lay groundwork for frictionless data access, authorization, analytics, and app integration. Josh led development of the SMART on FHIR specification (the basis for US Patient Access API capabilities that every certified EHR must support) and the SMART Health Cards specification (used by nationwide pharmacies, state public health departments, and EHRs to issue verifiable records of COVID-19 vaccination status). Josh also launched the Clinical Decision Support Hooks project, supporting integration of external decision support services within the clinical workflow. As a member of the national Health IT Standards Committee, Josh showed a special interest in tools and interfaces that support software developers who are new to the health domain.

Matt Might has been the Director of the Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) since 2017. At UAB, Matt has grown research-based consultation service for individualized care into a precision care clinical program serving the needs of patients for the most challenging cases in medicine. To serve this patient population, the Institute has developed mediKanren -- a biomedical artificial intelligence agent primarily intended for individualized drug repurposing, but also useful for challenging diagnostic odysseys and other applications. Over the past three years, deploying this agent with front-line clinicians has significantly guided the design, the interface and the engineering of this agent and its use in practice.

From 2016 to 2018, Matt was a Strategist in the Executive Office of the President in The White House. In 2015, Matt joined the faculty of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the Harvard Medical School, first as Visiting Professor and since 2017 as Senior Lecturer.

Margaret Mitchell is a researcher working on Ethical AI, currently focused on the ins and outs of ethics-informed AI development in tech. She has published over 50 papers on natural language generation, assistive technology, computer vision, and AI ethics, and holds multiple patents in the areas of conversation generation and sentiment classification. She previously worked at Google AI as a Staff Research Scientist, where she founded and co-led Google’s Ethical AI group, focused on foundational AI ethics research and operationalizing AI ethics Google-internally. Before joining Google, she was a researcher at Microsoft Research, focused on computer vision-to-language generation; and was a postdoc at Johns Hopkins, focused on Bayesian modeling and information extraction. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Aberdeen and a Master’s in computational linguistics from the University of Washington. While earning her degrees, she also worked from 2005-2012 on machine learning, neurological disorders, and assistive technology at Oregon Health and Science University. She has spearheaded a number of workshops and initiatives at the intersections of diversity, inclusion, computer science, and ethics. Her work has received awards from Secretary of State Ash Carter and the American Foundation for the Blind, and has been implemented by multiple technology companies. She likes gardening, dogs, and cats.

João received his medical training at the Federal University in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he also earned a PhD degree, studying mechanisms of tolerance to self-antigens in autoimmune diseases. In 2009, he was named a Pew Latin American Fellow in the Biomedical Sciences, moving to the United States to pursue studies on T cell in vivo dynamics of the immune responses with Ron Germain, at the National Institutes of Health. João was the senior editor for immunology and translational medicine at Cell from 2013-2017 and in December, 2017, he was appointed Chief Editor of Nature Medicine, where he leads a team of editors and journalists covering news, opinion and research across the entire landscape of translational and clinical research. He has given talks about medicine, science and publishing in many international conferences, and has championed efforts to raise ethical standards and transparency in the reporting of translational and clinical research. João cares about supporting young investigators, creating opportunities to make scientific publishing more inclusive, and harnessing the potential of scientific research to reduce health inequalities globally.

Ziad Obermeyer is Associate Professor and Blue Cross of California Distinguished Professor at UC Berkeley. His research and teaching focus on machine learning as a tool for improving decision making in health. He has received numerous awards (from the National Academy of Medicine, the NIH, the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, professional societies in medicine and economics), and publishes in a wide range of journals (Science, Nature Medicine, the New England Journal of Medicine, leading computer science conferences). His work has been highly influential, and is frequently cited in the public debate about algorithms, as well as federal and state regulatory guidance and civil investigations. He is a co-founder of Nightingale Open Science, a non-profit that makes massive new medical imaging datasets available for research, and Dandelion, a platform for AI innovation in health. He continues to practice emergency medicine in underserved communities.

Eric Rubin has been Editor-in-Chief at the New England Journal of Medicine since 2019 after serving as an Associate Editor for several years. He is an infectious disease physician at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a tuberculosis researcher at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.

Eric holds an AB degree from Harvard College and MD and PhD degrees from Tufts University. He was a resident and clinical fellow at the Massachusetts General Hospital and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School. Eric was the Irene Heinz Given Professor and Chair of the Department of Immunology and Infectious Disease before joining NEJM full time but continues to do lab work at the Harvard Chan School. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and a member of the National Academy of Medicine.

Suchi Saria, PhD, is the Founder and CEO of Bayesian Health, the John C. Malone endowed chair and the Director of the Machine Learning, AI and Healthcare Lab at Johns Hopkins University. Her research has pioneered the development of next generation diagnostic and treatment planning tools that use statistical machine learning methods to individualize care. She has written seminal papers in the field of ML and its use for improving patient care and has given over 250 invited keynotes and talks to organizations including the NAM, NAS, and NIH. Dr. Saria has served as an advisor to several Fortune 500 companies and her work has been funded by leading organizations including the NIH, FDA, NSF, DARPA and CDC.

Dr. Saria has won many awards for excellence in AI and care delivery, including IEEE’s “AI’s 10 to Watch”, Sloan Fellow, MIT Tech Review’s “35 Under 35”, National Academy of Medicine’s list of “Emerging Leaders in Health and Medicine”, World Economic Forum’s 100 Brilliant Minds Under 40, Modern Healthcare’s Top 25 Innovators, The Armstrong Award for Excellence in Quality and Safety.

Rupa Sarkar is the founding Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet Digital Health. Since her appointment in November 2018, The Lancet Digital Health has become the leading journal in the field of artificial intelligence and digital health, with a mission to advance standards for the next generation of health care technology.

Rupa is an experienced editor and scientist working across a broad range of subject areas relevant to digital health. She has delivered seminars at over 30 conferences in the USA, China, India, Europe, and UK. Her interests span all interdisciplinary areas of digital health, with a particular interest in genomics and machine learning in clinical applications and, she is experienced in the current challenges and opportunities in the field of digital health.

Rupa obtained her Ph.D. in embryonic stem cell development from Imperial College London, U.K., under the guidance of Prof. Robert Winston and Dr. Nick Dibb. After her postdoctoral research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, NY, USA, Rupa joined the Nature Research Group. Prior to her appointment at The Lancet Digital Health, Rupa was the Chief Editor of Nature Protocols.

Nigam Shah is Professor of Medicine (Biomedical Informatics) at Stanford University and serves as the Chief Data Scientist for Stanford Health Care. Dr. Shah’s research group analyzes multiple types of health data (EHR, Claims, Wearables, Weblogs, and Patient blogs), to answer clinical questions, generate insights, and build predictive models for the learning health system. His most recent effort was on using aggregate patient data at the bedside via a specialty consultation service, which was cited by the director of the National Library of Medicine in her testimony to the US Congress. Dr. Shah is an inventor on eight patents and patent applications, has authored over 200 scientific publications and has co-founded two companies. Dr. Shah was elected into the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) in 2015 and was inducted into the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) in 2016. He holds an MBBS from Baroda Medical College, India, a PhD from Penn State University and completed postdoctoral training at Stanford University.

Dr. Nicholas Tatonetti is associate professor of biomedical informatics in the Departments of Biomedical Informatics, Systems Biology, and Medicine and is Director of Clinical Informatics at the Institute for Genomic Medicine and the Herbert Irviing Comprehensive Cancer Center at Columbia University. He received his PhD from Stanford University where he focused on the development of novel statistical and computational methods for observational data mining. He applied these methods to drug safety surveillance and the discovery of dangerous adverse drug effects and has identified and validated previously unknown serious drug-drug interactions. His lab at Columbia is focused on using massive-scale real clinical and molecular data for making robust and validated scientific discoveries, with a particular focus on detecting, explaining, and validating drug effects and drug interactions. Dr. Tatonetti has published over 100 peer-reviewed scientific publications across medicine, systems biology, machine learning, and bioinformatics. He is passionate about the integration of real-world data (such as those stored in the electronic health records) and high-dimensional biological data (captured using next-generation sequencing, high-throughput screening, and other "omics" technologies) to reimagine and rescale the scientific method.

Jessie Tenenbaum serves as the Chief Data Officer (CDO) for DHHS, where she oversees data strategy across the Department enabling the use information to inform and evaluate policy and improve the health and well-being of residents of North Carolina. Prior to taking on the role of CDO, Dr. Tenenbaum was a founding faculty member of the Division of Translational Biomedical Informatics within Duke University’s Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics where her research focused on informatics methods to enable precision medicine, particularly in mental health. She is also interested in ethical, legal, and social issues around big data and precision medicine. Nationally, Dr. Tenenbaum has served as Associate Editor for the Journal of Biomedical Informatics and as an elected member of the Board of Directors for the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). She currently serves on the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Library of Medicine.

Jodie Trafton, Ph.D. directs the Program Evaluation and Resource Center (PERC) within the National Office of Mental Health and Suicide Prevention for the Veterans Health Administration. PERC develops and implements data-based management systems, clinical decision support , and innovative clinical programs, and conducts program evaluations across VHA health care systems. She has specific expertise in opioid safety, addiction and pain, overdose and suicide prevention, performance measurement and behavior change. Her team has most recently been involved in national initiatives to implement targeted interventions for suicide prevention (e.g. REACHVET, high risk flag population management, safety planning) and opioid safety (e.g. data-based risk reviews, urine drug screening), overdose education and naloxone distribution, evidence-based psychotropic prescribing and psychotherapy protocols, and strategic MH program planning and management practices. She is a Clinical Professor (affiliated) at Stanford University School of Medicine Dept of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Center for Health Policy.

Scott Weingarten MD, MPH is Chief Value Officer and Board Member of Vytalize Health. Scott was Chief Executive Officer of Stanson Health a clinical decision support and analytics company which has been purchased by approximately 600 hospitals and is used by more than 400,000 providers. He sold Stanson Health to Premier, Inc in a successful “exit.” He has been Senior Vice President and Chief Clinical Transformation Officer at Cedars-Sinai, Professor of Medicine at Cedars-Sinai, and Professor of Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

He is currently a Board of Director for the Scottsdale Institute, Hallmark Healthcare, Charles Drew University School of Medicine and Science, and Downtown Women’s Center. At Cedars-Sinai, he has received the President’s Award, the Golden Apple Teaching Award, and Alumnus of the Year. Dr. Weingarten was the co-founder, president and chief executive officer of Zynx Health, which was the leader for order sets and care plans for electronic health records. Scott sold Zynx Health to the Cerner Corporation and later to the Hearst Corporation in two successful “exits.” He is a co-inventor of three software patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.