Health Data Science Distinguished Speaker: Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD, Harvard Medical School
Hybrid Event
Date: Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2023
Time: 2PM-3PM
Location: BMC Hiebert Lounge, 72 E. Concord St, 14th Floor, Boston, or Zoom
Register here.
Talk Title: “Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Medicine: Population Health”
Abstract: If we look back to our most vivid population health challenge, it has been the COVID-19 pandemic from which we have just emerged. AI was notably unhelpful in the pandemic except perhaps for the development of vaccines. I will summarize the challenges and then focus on possibly the most important next steps in which AI, particularly after the emergence of Large Language Models, is available to the general public. These include, analysis, large scale communications, and policy development.
Bio: Isaac (Zak) Kohane, MD, PhD, is the inaugural Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics and the Marion V. Nelson Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. He served as co-author of the Institute of Medicine Report on Precision Medicine that has been the template for national efforts. He develops and applies computational techniques to address disease at multiple scales: from whole healthcare systems as “living laboratories” to the functional genomics of neurodevelopment with a focus on autism.
Over the last 30 years, Kohane’s research agenda has been driven by the vision of what biomedical researchers could do to find new cures, provide new diagnoses and deliver the best care available if data could be converted more rapidly to knowledge and knowledge to practice. In so doing, he has designed and led multiple internationally adopted efforts to “instrument” the healthcare enterprise for discovery and to enable innovative decision-making tools to be applied to the point of care. At the same time, the new insights afforded by ’omic-scale molecular analyses have inspired him and his collaborators to work on re-characterizing and reclassifying diseases such as autism, rheumatoid arthritis and cancers. In many of these studies, the developmental trajectories of thousands of genes have been a powerful tool in unraveling complex diseases.
Co-sponsors: The SPH Population Health Data Science Program, the Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering, the SPH Department of Biostatistics, and the Providence/Boston Center for AIDS Research (CFAR)