The COVID-19 pandemic baffled healthcare systems around the world. Governments were unprepared. Our vulnerabilities laid bare. Today, the relentless breakthroughs in computational power and algorithms are driving extraordinary progress in artificial intelligence (AI), leaving an indelible mark on the technological landscape. As we step into the post-COVID era, medicine, and healthcare are undergoing swift transformations, seamlessly entwined with the leaps and bounds of data-driven breakthroughs that are forging ahead across various domains.

The post-COVID AI symposium aims to provide a forum for in-depth discussions of the lingering health challenges and possible computational solutions in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

David Walt, PhD

David R. Walt is the Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Bioinspired Engineering at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Core Faculty Member of the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, Associate Member at the Broad Institute, and is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor.

Dr. Walt is the Scientific Founder of Illumina Inc., Quanterix Corp., and has co-founded multiple other life sciences startups including Ultivue, Inc., Arbor Biotechnologies, Sherlock Biosciences, Vizgen, Inc., and Torus Biosciences. He has received numerous national and international awards and honors for his fundamental and applied work in the field of optical microwell arrays and single molecules including the 2023 National Academy of Engineering’s Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize and the 2021 Kabiller Prize in Nanoscience and Nanomedicine. He serves on the NASEM Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases in the 21st Century and has been a member and chair of multiple NASEM studies. His lab’s research focuses on creating and using novel technologies to solve unmet clinical diagnostics problems. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the U.S. National Academy of Medicine, a Member of the American Philosophical Society, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, and is inducted in the US National Inventors Hall of Fame. He pioneered the use of microwell arrays for single-molecule detection and genetic measurements, which has revolutionized the process of genetic and proteomic analysis, enabling the cost of DNA sequencing and genotyping to plummet nearly a millionfold in the last decade. This technology is now the gold standard for genomic analysis for a wide variety of applications including screening embryos for genetic defects before in vitro fertilization, studying disease in preserved/frozen tissues, improving crop disease resistance, and identifying individuals’ metabolic profiles to ensure proper drug dosage. His lab is developing new diagnostics tools and new biomarker assay technologies based on single molecule detection that can address unmet clinical needs in diagnostics. The lab is focused on early detection of breast cancer, detection of active tuberculosis and other infectious diseases, diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases, and prediction of immunotherapy response for cancer. His lab has been deeply involved in developing new tools to understand and diagnose COVID-19. Walt’s lab is also pursuing fundamental research on single enzyme molecules to provide insight into enzyme mechanisms.

Susan Murphy, PhD

Susan A. Murphy is the Mallinckrodt Professor of Statistics and of Computer Science at Harvard University and an associate faculty with the harvard Kempner Institute,

The Statistical Reinforcement Learning Lab's work concerns the development of data analytic algorithms and methods for informing sequential decision making in health. In particular for (1) constructing individualized sequences of treatments (a.k.a., adaptive interventions) for use in informing clinical decision making and (2) constructing real time individualized sequences of treatments (a.k.a., Just-in-Time Adaptive Interventions) delivered by mobile devices. We are engaged in a number of clinical trials that use our real-time algorithms to learn and optimize the delivery of digital interventions. For her work on trial designs and analytics, Dr. Murphy was awarded a McArthur Fellowship in 2013, in 2014 she was elected a member of the National Academy of Medicine and in 2016 she was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the US National Academies.

Andrea Foulkes, ScD

Andrea S. Foulkes is Director of Biostatistics at Massachusetts General Hospital, Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Professor, Department of Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Dr. Foulkes has a 20-year active research program in statistical methods for precision medicine using high-dimensional molecular and cellular level data to inform clinical risk factors for complex disease phenotypes at the intersection of infectious disease and cardiovascular disease. Her statistical methods research is motivated and grounded in HIV/AIDS, cardiometabolic disease, inflammation and SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 research. As PI on multiple NIH-funded awards, she is leading efforts to develop and evaluate principled statistical methods for interrogating the mechanistic underpinnings of complex diseases.

Pam Belluck

Pam Belluck is a health and science writer whose honors include sharing a Pulitzer Prize and winning the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting.

Ms. Belluck writes about a wide range of subjects, including the coronavirus pandemic, reproductive health, brain science, neurological disorders and mental health. Her work on Ebola with six colleagues won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting and other awards. Her project about surgery for women traumatized by genital cutting won a Nellie Bly Award for Best Front Page Story and other honors. Ms. Belluck’s reporting on the devastating effects of Covid was honored with a New York Press Club Award and a Newswomen’s Club Front Page Award. She contributed, along with many colleagues, to the Times’s pandemic coverage, which earned the paper a 2021 Pulitzer for public service. Ms. Belluck, along with a photographer and translator, also won a New York Press Club award for reporting in Brazil on babies harmed by the Zika virus.

Chirag Patel, PhD

Chirag J. Patel is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Patel's group aims to dissect inter-individual differences in human phenomes through strategies that integrate data sources that capture the comprehensive clinical experience (e.g., through the electronic medical record), the complex phenomena of environmental exposure (e.g., high-throughput measures of the exposome), and inherited genomic variation.

Kari Stephens, PhD

Kari A. Stephens is the Helen D. Cohen Endowed Professor, Research Section Head, and Director of Clinical Research Informatics in the Department of Family Medicine.

Dr. Stephens is a practicing clinical psychologist and biomedical informaticist with an adjunct appointment in Biomedical Informatics & Medical Education. Her current research focuses on electronic health record data sharing / integration to improve population health in primary care and dissemination of behavioral treatments into integrated primary care settings, particularly among disadvantaged populations. She holds leadership roles locally and nationally in efforts pursuing use of tools and methods that leverage electronic health data in research, particularly in primary care to improve health, including leading regional informatics for the UW Institute of Translational Health Sciences, data science fellow with the UW eScience Institute, and Associate Director of the National Alzheimer’s Coordinating Center.

Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD

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 and the Editor in Chief of NEJM AI.

Dr. Kohane 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.

David Simon, Ph.D., J.D., LL.M.

David A. Simon is an Associate Professor of Law and an expert on intellectual property, healthcare law and liability.

Dr. Simon has served on the law faculty at Harvard Law School, George Washington University School of Law, and the University of Kansas School of Law. During his time at Harvard Law School, he led a three-year initiative at Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics dubbed Diagnosing in the Home: The Ethical, Legal, and Regulatory Challenges and Opportunities of Digital Home Health.

Professor Simon’s research focuses on innovation in healthcare, with an emphasis on prescription drugs and devices. His current projects include developing a new theory of federal preemption as to claims against prescription drug and device manufacturers that promote off-label uses, designing systems to support research on ultra-rare diseases and conditions, and examining philosophical problems in intellectual property. His work has appeared or will appear in a variety of publications, including the Emory Law Review, the Georgia Law Review, the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, the Journal of Law & the Biosciences, JAMA, Nature Biotechnology and the Journal of Law, Medicine, & Ethics.

Rafael Irizarry , Ph.D.

Rafael Irizarry is a Professor of Applied Statistics at Harvard and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Chair of the Department of Data Sciences at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Professor of Biostatistics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Since 1999, Dr. Irizarry's work has focused on Genomics and Computational Biology problems. In particular, he has worked on the analysis and signal processing of microarray, next-generation sequencing, and genomic data. He is currently interested in leveraging his knowledge in translational work, e.g. developing diagnostic tools and discovering biomarkers. Professor Irizarry also develops open-source software implementing his statistical methodology. His software tools are widely used, and he is one of the leaders and founders of the Bioconductor Project, an open source and open development software project for the analysis of genomic data. Bioconductor provides one of the most widely used software tools for the analysis of microarray data.

Yugang Jia, Ph.D., MPH

Yugang Jia is a data science lead at Verily Life Science and a part time lecturer in MIT Institute for Medical Engineering & Science.

Bruce Levy, MD

Bruce D. David Levy is the division chief of the Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine Division and interim chair of the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH). He is also the Francis B. Parker Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Levy’s clinical interests include acute respiratory distress syndrome, asthma, bronchiectasis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. His laboratory aims to identify new pathways to resolve pulmonary inflammation or injury through the roles of endogenous counter-regulatory mediators in the lung, and his work has helped lead to over 10 patents awarded or pending. He has written more than 120 peer-reviewed publications, has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, and currently serves as associate editor of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine and The New England Journal of Medicine's clinical problem-solving interactive case series.

Eric Berger, MBA

Eric Berger is a member of Bain’s Healthcare & Life Sciences and Private Equity practices with more than 15 years of consulting experience.

Eric advises a mix of corporate and private equity clients. He has completed more than 150 diligences. Currently, he is co-leading Bain’s efforts around genAI across healthcare and life sciences clients. Prior to joining Bain in 2011, Eric worked for a small consulting firm in Boston focused on the pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device industries. Previously, he was a researcher in organic chemistry at Harvard University. Eric has published in Science and the Journal of the American Chemical Society and was awarded a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Jean Dreyfus Boissevain scholarship. Eric earned an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management. He holds a BA cum laude and MA in chemistry from Harvard University.

Saeed Hassanpour, PhD

Saeed Hassanpour is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Data Science at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College, with adjunct appointments in the Computer Science and Epidemiology Departments.

Dr. Hassanpour's research is focused on developing new computational methods to capture and organize clinically meaningful information from complex and massive amounts of biomedical data. His lab uses this distilled information to provide intelligent tools to help biomedical researchers understand their data better and assist clinicians in medical diagnosis and practice.

Amir Tahmasebi, PhD

Amir Tahmasebi is Director of Data Science within Medication Delivery Solutions Business at Becton Dickinson (BD). He is an accomplished data scientist and innovation leader with a passion for leveraging data-driven insights to solve complex problems in healthcare.

Prior to joining BD, Dr. Tahmasebi built and led Machine Learning and AI R&D teams at several healthtech companies including Invitae, Ciitizen, Enlitic Inc., and CodaMetrix. Simultaneously, Amir served as a lecturer at MIT, Northeastern University, Boston University, and Columbia University. Amir's research interest is focused on innovating and productionizing AI-driven solutions (computer vision and NLP) in healthcare, specifically in patient clinical context modeling, clinical outcome analytics and clinical decision support. Amir received his PhD in Computer Science from the School of Computing, Queen's University, Canada. Amir has published and presented his work in several conferences and journals including MICCAI, IPCAI, IEEE TMI, EMNLP, NeurIPS, NAACL, SPIE, RE•WORK AI Summit, and RSNA. He has also been granted 29 patent awards worldwide.

Robin Farmanfarmaian

Robin Farmanfarmaian is a professional speaker and healthcare entrepreneur. She has been involved with over 20 early-stage startups in cutting edge pharma, medical device, and AI enabled software. These include companies focused on vaccines, inhaled insulin, virtual reality for radiology, remote patient monitoring, and small molecule candidates found through AI for drug discovery, including one on the p53 pathway, a critical pathway in oncology.

Robin is on an advisory council for ARPA-H, a government organization with a $2.5B grant budget to fund healthcare innovation. Robin also co-founded a non-profit that worked with the White House and DoD to fund scientists in cryopreservation and tissue engineering for organ transplants. She is the author of 4 books, including “The Patient as CEO” and “How AI Can Democratize Healthcare”.

Rebecca Mishuris, MD, MS, MPH

Rebecca G. Mishuris is the Mass General Brigham Chief Medical Information Office and VP, Digital. She is faculty at Harvard Medical School and a practicing primary care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

The 2023 Post-Covid AI Symposium program will include a small number of poster/ignite presentations. The objective of these presentations is to foster and promote research in on long COVID and health AI.

Topics

Submitted poster abstracts should fall under the following categories:

• long COVID
• AI/ML applications in COVID studies
• Clinical AI/ML

Review & Evaluation

All submissions will be peer-reviewed and scored by a panel of expert judges prior to the symposium, based on:

• Relevance to symposium topics
• Demonstration of evidence-based, innovative and emerging approaches to care
• Clarity and completeness of submission

Deadline: September 3rd, 2023

Abstract Submission Form

Travel scholarship may be available to top accepted presenting authors.

Venue

Simmons University, Linda k. Paresky Conference Center

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