Program

Bio: Isaac “Zak” Kohane, MD, PhD, is the inaugural chair of Harvard Medical School’s Department of Biomedical Informatics, whose mission is to develop the methods, tools, and infrastructure required for a new generation of scientists and care providers to move biomedicine rapidly forward by taking advantage of the insight and precision offered by big data. Kohane develops and applies computational techniques to address disease at multiple scales, from whole health care systems to the functional genomics of neurodevelopment. He also has worked on AI applications in medicine since the 1990’s, including automated ventilator control, pediatric growth monitoring, detection of domestic abuse, diagnosing autism from multimodal data and most recently assisting clinicians using whole genome sequence and clinical histories to diagnose rare or unknown disease patients. His most urgent question is how to enable doctors to be most effective and enjoy their profession when they enter into a substantial symbiosis with machine intelligence. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the American College of Medical Informatics.

Bio: Leo focuses on scaling clinical research to be more inclusive through open access data and software, particularly for limited resource settings; identifying bias in the data to prevent them from being encrypted in models and algorithms; and redesigning research using the principles of team science and the hive learning strategy.

Bio: Jason Fries is a research scientist at the Shah Lab at Stanford University. His work is centered on enabling domain experts to easily construct and modify machine learning models, particularly in the field of medicine where expert-labeled training data are hard to acquire. His research interests include weakly supervised machine learning, foundation models for medicine, and data-centric AI.

Bio: Maia Hightower, MD, MBA, MPH, is an accomplished healthcare IT executive and internist. She currently serves as the executive Vice President and Chief Digital & Technology Officer at the University of Chicago Medicine and the CEO and co-founder of Equality AI, a startup aimed at achieving health equity through responsible AI and machine-learning operations. Previously, she was the chief medical information officer and associate chief medical officer at University of Utah Health and served in similar roles at University of Iowa Health Care and Stanford Health Care. Dr. Hightower's work has focused on leveraging digital technology to address health inequities and promoting diversity and inclusion within healthcare IT systems. Her leadership in the field has earned her widespread recognition.

Bio: Ziad Obermeyer is Associate Professor and Blue Cross of California Distinguished Professor at UC Berkeley, where he works at the intersection of machine learning and health. He is a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator, a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and was named an Emerging Leader by the National Academy of Medicine. Previously, he was Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, and continues to practice emergency medicine in underserved communities.

Bio: Dr. Halamka is an emergency medicine physician, medical informatics expert and president of the Mayo Clinic Platform, which is focused on transforming health care by leveraging artificial intelligence, connected health care devices and a network of partners. Dr. Halamka has been developing and implementing health care information strategy and policy for more than 25 years. Previously, he was executive director of the Health Technology Exploration Center for Beth Israel Lahey Health, chief information officer at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and International Healthcare Innovation Professor at Harvard Medical School. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine.

Bio: Elaine Nsoesie is an Associate Professor at Boston University's School of Public Health and a leading voice in the use of data and technology to advance health equity. She is leads the Racial Data Tracker project at Boston University's Center for Antiracist Research and serves as a Senior Advisor to the Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Consortium to Advance Health Equity and Researcher Diversity (AIM-AHEAD) program at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Nsoesie has published extensively on the use of data from social media, search engines, and cell phones for public health surveillance and is dedicated to increasing representation of underrepresented communities in data science. She completed her PhD in Computational Epidemiology from Virginia Tech and has held postdoctoral positions at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital.

Bio: Dr. Khaled El Emam is the Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Medical AI at the University of Ottawa, where he is a Professor in the School of Epidemiology and Public Health. He is also a Senior Scientist at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute and Director of the multi-disciplinary Electronic Health Information Laboratory, conducting research on privacy enhancing technologies to enable the sharing of health data for secondary purposes, including synthetic data generation and de-identification methods. Khaled is a co-founder of Replica Analytics, a company that develops synthetic data generation technology, which was recently acquired by Aetion. As an entrepreneur, Khaled founded or co-founded six product and services companies involved with data management and data analytics, with some having successful exits. Prior to his academic roles, he was a Senior Research Officer at the National Research Council of Canada. He also served as the head of the Quantitative Methods Group at the Fraunhofer Institute in Kaiserslautern, Germany. He participates in a number of committees, number of the European Medicines Agency Technical Anonymization Group, the Panel on Research Ethics advising on the TCPS, the Strategic Advisory Council of the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, and also is co-editor-in-chief of the JMIR AI journal. In 2003 and 2004, he was ranked as the top systems and software engineering scholar worldwide by the Journal of Systems and Software based on his research on measurement and quality evaluation and improvement. He held the Canada Research Chair in Electronic Health Information at the University of Ottawa from 2005 to 2015. Khaled has a PhD from the Department of Electrical and Electronics.

Bio: Karandeep Singh, MD, MMSc, is an Assistant Professor of Learning Health Sciences, Internal Medicine, Urology, and Information at the University of Michigan. He directs the Machine Learning for Learning Health Systems (ML4LHS) Lab, which focuses on translational issues related to the implementation of machine learning (ML) models within health systems. He serves as an Associate Chief Medical Information Officer for Artificial Intelligence for Michigan Medicine and is the Associate Director for Implementation for U-M Precision Health, a Presidential Initiative focused on bringing research discoveries to the bedside, with a focus on prediction models and genomics data. He chairs the Michigan Medicine Clinical Intelligence Committee, which oversees the governance of machine learning models across the health system. He teaches a health data science course for graduate and doctoral students, and provides clinical care for people with kidney disease. He completed his internal medicine residency at UCLA Medical Center, where he served as chief resident, and a nephrology fellowship in the combined Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Massachusetts General Hospital program in Boston, MA. He completed his medical education at the University of Michigan Medical School and holds a master’s degree in medical sciences in Biomedical Informatics from Harvard Medical School. He is board certified in internal medicine, nephrology, and clinical informatics.

Bio: Dr. Nigam Shah is Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, and Chief Data Scientist for Stanford Health Care. His 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. At Stanford Healthcare, he leads artificial intelligence and data science efforts for advancing the scientific understanding of disease, improving the practice of clinical medicine and orchestrating the delivery of health care. Dr. Shah is an inventor on eight patents and patent applications, has authored over 200 scientific publications and has co-founded three 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.

Bio: Dr. Chute is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Health Informatics, Professor of Medicine, Public Health, and Nursing at Johns Hopkins University, and Chief Research Information Officer for Johns Hopkins Medicine. He is also Section Head of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science and Deputy Director of the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research. He received his undergraduate and medical training at Brown University, internal medicine residency at Dartmouth, and doctoral training in Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Harvard. He is Board Certified in Internal Medicine and Clinical Informatics, and an elected Fellow of the American College of Physicians, the American College of Epidemiology, HL7, the American Medical Informatics Association, and the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI), as well as a Founding Fellow of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics; he was president of ACMI 2017-18. He is an elected member of the Association of American Physicians. His career has focused on how we can represent clinical information to support analyses and inferencing, including comparative effectiveness analyses, decision support, best evidence discovery, and translational research. He has had a deep interest in the semantic consistency of health data, harmonized information models, and ontology. His current research focuses on translating basic science information to clinical practice, how we classify dysfunctional phenotypes (disease), and the harmonization and rendering of real-world clinical data including electronic health records to support data inferencing. He became founding Chair of Biomedical Informatics at Mayo Clinic in 1988, retiring from Mayo in 2014, where he remains an emeritus Professor of Biomedical Informatics. He is presently PI on a spectrum of high-profile informatics grants from NIH spanning translational science including co-lead on the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C). He has been active on many HIT standards efforts and chaired ISO Technical Committee 215 on Health Informatics and chaired the World Health Organization (WHO) International Classification of Disease Revision (ICD-11).

Bio: Robert Platt is Professor in the Departments of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health, and of Pediatrics, at McGill University. He holds the Albert Boehringer I endowed chair in Pharmacoepidemiology, and is Principal Investigator of the Canadian Network for Observational Drug Effect Studies (CNODES). His research focuses on improving statistical methods for the study of medications using administrative data, with a substantive focus on medications in pregnancy. Dr. Platt is an editor-in-chief of Statistics in Medicine and is on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Epidemiology and Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety. He has published over 400 articles, one book and several book chapters on biostatistics and epidemiology.

Bio: Tianxi Cai is John Rock Professor of Translational Data Science at Harvard, with joint appointments in the Biostatistics Department and the Department of Biomedical Informatics. She directs the Translational Data Science Center for a Learning Health System at Harvard Medical School and co-directs the Applied Bioinformatics Core at VA MAVERIC. She is a major player in developing analytical tools for mining multi-institutional EHR data, real world evidence, and predictive modeling with large scale biomedical data. Tianxi received her Doctor of Science in Biostatistics at Harvard and was an assistant professor at the University of Washington before returning to Harvard as a faculty member in 2002.

Bio: Dr. Yong Chen is Professor of Biostatistics at the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn). He directs a Computing, Inference and Learning Lab at University of Pennsylvania, which focuses on integrating fundamental principles and wisdoms of statistics into quantitative methods for tackling key challenges in modern biomedical data. Dr. Chen is an expert in synthesis of evidence from multiple data sources, including systematic review and meta-analysis, distributed algorithms, and data integration, with applications to comparative effectiveness studies, health policy, and precision medicine. He has published over 170 peer-reviewed papers in a wide spectrum of methodological and clinical areas. During the pandemic, Dr. Chen is serving as Director of Biostatistics Core for Pedatric PASC of the RECOVER COVID initiative which a national multi-center RWD-based study on Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS CoV-2 infection (PASC), involving more than 13 million patients across more than 10 health systems. He is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association, the American Medical Informatics Association, Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute, and Elected Member of the Society for Research Synthesis Methodology.

Bio: Dr. Khaled El Emam is the Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Medical AI at the University of Ottawa, where he is a Professor in the School of Epidemiology and Public Health. He is also a Senior Scientist at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute and Director of the multi-disciplinary Electronic Health Information Laboratory, conducting research on privacy enhancing technologies to enable the sharing of health data for secondary purposes, including synthetic data generation and de-identification methods. Khaled is a co-founder of Replica Analytics, a company that develops synthetic data generation technology, which was recently acquired by Aetion. As an entrepreneur, Khaled founded or co-founded six product and services companies involved with data management and data analytics, with some having successful exits. Prior to his academic roles, he was a Senior Research Officer at the National Research Council of Canada. He also served as the head of the Quantitative Methods Group at the Fraunhofer Institute in Kaiserslautern, Germany. He participates in a number of committees, number of the European Medicines Agency Technical Anonymization Group, the Panel on Research Ethics advising on the TCPS, the Strategic Advisory Council of the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, and also is co-editor-in-chief of the JMIR AI journal. In 2003 and 2004, he was ranked as the top systems and software engineering scholar worldwide by the Journal of Systems and Software based on his research on measurement and quality evaluation and improvement. He held the Canada Research Chair in Electronic Health Information at the University of Ottawa from 2005 to 2015. Khaled has a PhD from the Department of Electrical and Electronics.

Bio: Li Xiong is a Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Emory University. She held a Winship Distinguished Research Professorship from 2015-2018. She has a Ph.D. from Georgia Institute of Technology, an MS from Johns Hopkins University, and a BS from the University of Science and Technology of China. She and her research lab, Assured Information Management and Sharing (AIMS), conduct research on algorithms and methods at the intersection of data management, machine learning, and data privacy and security, with a recent focus on privacy-enhancing and robust machine learning. She has published over 170 papers and received six best paper or runner up awards. She has served and serves as associate editor for IEEE TKDE, IEEE TDSC, and VLDBJ, general co-chair for ACM CIKM 2022, program co-chair for IEEE BigData 2020 and ACM SIGSPATIAL 2018, 2020, program vice-chair for ACM SIGMOD 2024, 2022, and IEEE ICDE 2023, 2020, and VLDB Sponsorship Ambassador. Her research is supported by federal agencies including NSF, NIH, AFOSR, PCORI, and industry awards including Google, IBM, Cisco, AT&T, and Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She is an IEEE felllow.