Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD, is the inaugural Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. For this event, he is hosted by Professor Mihaela van der Schaar of the University of Cambridge, a world authority on machine learning for medicine and Director of the Cambridge Centre for AI in Medicine (CCAIM).

Presentation Title: “Finding the Doctor in Biomedical Informatics”Presentation Summary: Are doctors currently leading biomedical informatics science and implementation? Have the data companies and the smart phone companies and the Electronic Health Record companies positioned themselves to be the true drivers of biomedical informatics? The acceleration of artificial intelligence applications in medicine is an opportunity for groups outside medicine but also an opportunity for clinicians to bring their creativity, values and experience to lead these efforts.

I’ll start by discussing the central role and intellectual leadership of doctors and other clinicians during the infancy of our field and ways in which clinicians have forfeited their leadership. I will then outline how clinicians have the opportunity to be once again leaders in accelerating research and development of biomedical informatics, specifically artificial intelligence, to the benefit of biomedical science and clinical care and the new teams that they will find themselves leading if they step up to the challenge.

Bio: Isaac 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 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. Kohane’s i2b2 project is currently deployed internationally to over 120 major academic health centers to drive discovery research in disease and pharmacovigilance (including providing evidence on drugs which ultimately contributed to “boxed warning” by the FDA). Dr. Kohane has published several hundred papers in the medical literature and authored a widely used book on Microarrays for an Integrative Genomics. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine and the American Society for Clinical Investigation.