Ben Deverman

Biography
Ben Deverman is the senior director of the vector engineering research group at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where he is also an institute scientist. The vector engineering team develops innovative gene delivery solutions for studying the central nervous system (CNS), with the aim of uncovering new avenues for treating psychiatric disorders. His group applies a variety of approaches including protein engineering, high-throughput in vivo selection and screening methods, and machine learning to develop novel AAV vectors that overcome pressing gene delivery challenges. In recent work, the Deverman team and collaborators found that the AAV-PHP.B family of capsids, which efficiently deliver genes throughout the mouse CNS, cross the blood-brain barrier by engaging a novel receptor on the vasculature, providing mechanistic insights that can be leveraged to engineer the next generation of AAV capsids for human CNS gene therapy. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Deverman lab built and maintains COVID-19 CG, an interactive, open access browser to help vaccine, therapeutics, and diagnostics developers and public health officials track SARS-CoV-2 mutations and lineages by location and time. Deverman joined the Broad in March 2018. Before this, he was the director of the CLARITY, Optogenetics and Vector Engineering Research (CLOVER) Center within the Beckman Institute at the California Institute of Technology. At Caltech, Deverman and colleagues identified numerous capsids, including AAV-PHP.B and an enhanced variant, AAV-PHP.eB, that made efficient brain-wide gene delivery in the adult possible for the first time. AAV-PHP.B and AAV-PHP.eB are now in use in laboratories around the world and are enabling a wide range of translational and basic neuroscience experiments. Deverman led the generation of the panel of AAV-PHP capsids by developing a novel AAV selection method, called Cre Recombinase-based Targeted Evolution (CREATE), that uses Cre transgenics to select for AAVs that transduce defined target cell types. Deverman has nearly 14 years of experience as a molecular biologist studying neuroscience and AAV engineering. As a postdoctoral fellow and research scientist at the California Institute of Technology, Deverman’s research focused on viral vector development and the roles of cytokines during neurodevelopment and in the context of demyelinating disease. He received a Ph.D. in molecular and cellular biology from Washington University School of Medicine and a B.S. in biochemistry from the University of Detroit Mercy. In 2019 he received the Broad Institute Excellence Award in Mentorship, Teaching, and Training and is a recipient of a Merkin Institute Fellowship at the Broad.

Gerold Meinhardt

Biography
Gerold is Medical Oncologist and Hematologist with 17 years of academic background, including 3 years as a Research Fellow at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and 20 years in oncology drug development in the pharmaceutical industry. He currently serves as Head of Early-Stage Oncology Team Leads at DSI. Prior to that, he was VP, Global Team Lead, responsible for the development of trastuzumab deruxtecan (DS-8201, ENHERTU). Prior to Daiichi Sankyo, Dr. Meinhardt served in different roles at Bayer Pharmaceuticals for more than 15 years, most notably as Vice President in Clinical Development leading the development of multikinase inhibitors sorafenib and regorafenib. Dr. Meinhardt has authored more than 60 PubMed-listed publications.

Okan Ekinci

Biography
Okan Ekinci, MD, MBA, is the Head of Digital Technology and Chief Medical Information Officer at Roche Information Solutions. He joined Roche in 2018 and served as Chief Medical Officer and Senior Vice President of Marketing & Innovation for the digital health business. Before that, Okan held various positions at Siemens Healthineers, including Chief Medical Officer and Head of Healthcare Consulting. Drawing on extensive experience across imaging, diagnostics, and pharma, he has advised healthcare institutions and governments on strategies for digital transformation, personalized healthcare, and artificial intelligence. Okan is a cardiologist by training and an adjunct professor of medicine at the University College Dublin.

Marina Sirota

Biography
Marina Sirota is a Professor and Interim Director of UCS Fs Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute. Previously, she served as a Senior Research Scientist at Pfizer, focusing on precision medicine. She earned her PhD in Biomedical Informatics from Stanford University. With 20 years of experience and over 170 publications, Dr. Sirota develops computational integrative methods for diagnostics and therapeutics, specializing in womens health. Her laboratory is funded by the NIA, NLM, NIAMS, Pfizer, and the March of Dimes. A 2017 A MIA Young Investigator Award recipient, she leads the UCSF March of Dimes Prematurity Research Center and co-directs ENACT, a precision medicine center for endometriosis. Dr. Sirota also founded UCS Fs AI4ALL program, which introduces high school girls to the applications of AI and machine learning in biomedicine.

Andy Beck

Biography
Andy earned his MD from Brown Medical School and completed residency and fellowship training in Anatomic Pathology and Molecular Genetic Pathology from Stanford University. He completed a PhD in Biomedical Informatics from Stanford University, where he developed one of the first machine-learning based systems for cancer pathology. He’s been certified by the American Board of Pathology in Anatomic Pathology and Molecular Genetic Pathology. Prior to co-founding PathAI, he was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School in the Department of Pathology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He has published over 110 papers in the fields of cancer biology, cancer pathology, and biomedical informatics.

Gilad Almogy

Biography
At Ultima Genomics, our mission is to continuously drive the scale of genomic information to enable unprecedented advances in biology and improvements in human health.To achieve this, we built a revolutionary new sequencing architecture that scales far beyond conventional technologies, enabling scientists to overcome the tradeoffs they face between the breadth, depth and frequency of sequencing.

Fei-Fei Li

Biography
Dr. Fei-Fei Li is the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, and a Founding Co-Director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute. She served as the Director of Stanford’s AI Lab from 2013 to 2018. In industry, Dr. Li has served as a Vice President at Google and Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud (2017-2018), board member or advisor in various public or private companies (notably Twitter). She is currently a Co-founder/CEO of World Labs, an AI company focusing on Spatial Intelligence and generative AI. Dr. Li obtained her B.A. degree in physics from Princeton in 1999 with High Honors, and her PhD degree in electrical engineering from California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2005. She has been recognized as the Distinguished Alumni by both Princeton and Caltech in 2020 and 2024 respectively. Dr. Li also holds Honorary Doctorate Degrees from Yale University and Harvey Mudd College. Dr. Li is a researcher and technologist in AI, currently focusing on deep learning, robotic learning, spatial intelligence and ambient intelligence for healthcare delivery. In the past she has also worked on cognitive and computational neuroscience. Dr. Li has published more than 400 scientific articles in top-tier journals and conferences in science, engineering and computer science, and is recognized as one of the most cited computer scientists. She is the inventor of ImageNet and the ImageNet Challenge, a critical large-scale dataset and benchmarking effort that has been widely regarded as one of the three driving forces of the birth of modern AI and deep learning revolution. Dr. Li is the author a popular science memoir called “The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration and Discovery at the Dawn of AI”, published by Macmillan Publishers. Dr. Li is widely recognized as a pioneer of modern AI. She is an elected Member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) and American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS). She is also a Fellow of ACM, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Among her many recognitions, Dr. Li is a laureate of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (2025), VinFuture Prize (2024), a recipient of the Intel Lifetime Achievements Award (2023), the IEEE PAMI Thomas Huang Memorial Prize (2022), the IEEE PAMI Longuet-Higgins Prize (2019), the National Geographic Society Further Award (2019), the IAPR J.K. Aggarwal Prize (2016), the IEEE PAMI Mark Everingham Award (2016), the Alfred Sloan Faculty Award (2011), among others.

Andrew Ng

Biography
Andrew Ng is one of the most influential leaders in modern artificial intelligence and AI education. He is Founder of DeepLearning.AI, Managing Partner, AI Aspire, Managing General Partner at AI Fund, Chairman and Co-Founder of Coursera, and an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University. He was the founding lead of Google Brain and previously served as VP and Chief Scientist at Baidu, helping move deep learning from research into large-scale real-world use. Through his teaching, writing, companies, and investments, Ng has helped make AI accessible to millions of learners and practical for researchers, entrepreneurs, engineers, clinicians, and enterprises. His work has shaped how AI is taught, built, and deployed across industries, an impact especially relevant to precision medicine, where responsible AI is becoming central to interpreting complex clinical, molecular, imaging, and multi-omic data.

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Talk
Fireside Chat
Agentic AI in medicine Democratizing AI for clinicians and researchers

Sharat Israni

Biography
Sharat Israni previously was Executive Director, Data Science, at Stanford Medicine. A long serving Technology executive, Sharat’s teams pioneered the use of Big Data. He served as VP of Data at Yahoo! (19992008) and Intuit (201013), which pioneered Big Data Science to reinvent their products. He led Digital Media systems for broadcast interactive TV at Silicon Graphics; and Data teams at IBM and HP. Sharat has been PI for NSF, NIH and RCUK workshops on Data Science topics in Biomedicine, and is a peer reviewer of some scientific journals.

Germán Corredor Prada

Biography
Germán Corredor, PhD, MS, is an assistant professor in the Walter H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. Dr. Corredor is a member of the Cancer Immunology Research Program at Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

Pranav Rajpurkar

Biography
Pranav Rajpurkar is driven by a fundamental passion for building reliable artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for biomedical decision making. His lab approaches biomedical problems with a computational lens, developing AI algorithms, datasets, and interfaces that cut across computer vision, natural language processing, and structured health data. He has collaborated with clinicians across medical specialties, including radiology, cardiology, and pathology, to make some of the first demonstrations of expert-level deep learning algorithms and their effects on clinician decision making. Previously, Dr. Rajpurkar received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees, all in Computer Science from Stanford University. His lab’s current research directions include algorithm development for limited labeled data settings, high-quality dataset curation at scale, and the design of effective clinician-AI collaboration setups.

Drew Williamson

Biography
Drew Williamson, MD is an assistant professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Emory University School of Medicine. Dr. Williamson is a member of the Cell and Molecular Biology Research Program at Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University

Eric Horvitz

Biography
Eric Horvitz, MD, PhD, is Chief Scientific Officer at Microsoft where he leads initiatives at the intersection of science, technology, and society, with emphases on artificial intelligence, biosciences, and healthcare. His research contributions have advanced AI through innovations in perception, reasoning, and decision-making under uncertainty. Dr. Horvitz is known for his contributions to AI theory and practice, with a focus on principles and applications of AI amidst the complexities of the open world. His direction-setting research efforts include harnessing probability and utility in machine learning and reasoning, developing models of bounded rationality, constructing systems that perceive and act via interpreting multisensory streams of information, and pioneering principles and mechanisms for supporting human-AI collaboration and complementarity. His efforts and collaborations have led to fielded systems in healthcare, transportation, ecommerce, operating systems, and aerospace. Beyond his scientific work, he has pursued programs, organizations, and studies on ethics, values, and safety with applications and influences of AI. He founded and chairs Microsoft’s Aether committee on AI, effects, and ethics in engineering and research. He established the One Hundred Year Study on AI at Stanford University and co-founded and served as board chair of the Partnership on AI (PAI). He served as a Congressionally appointed commissioner on the National Security Commission on AI, where he chaired the line of effort on ethical and trustworthy AI. Dr. Horvitz received the Feigenbaum Prize and the Allen Newell Prize for his fundamental contributions to the science and practice of AI. He received the CHI Academy honor for his work at the intersection of AI and human-computer interaction. He has been elected fellow of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American College of Medical Informatics, and the American Philosophical Society. Dr. Horvitz currently serves on the advisory boards of the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) and Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI). He served as a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), president of the AAAI, as a member of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) and Computing Community Consortium (CCC), and on advisory committees for the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He received Ph.D. and M.D. degrees at Stanford University. Before moving into the role of Chief Scientific Officer, he served as director of Microsoft Research overseeing research labs in Redmond, Washington; Cambridge, Massachusetts; New York City, New York; Montreal, Canada; Cambridge, United Kingdom; and Bangalore, India.

Janusz Dutkowski

Biography
Janusz Dutkowski is Founder and CEO of Data4Cure, Inc. a company focused on combining systems biology, machine learning and AI to facilitate continuous translation of biomedical data to knowledge. His background is in mathematics and computer science and he has been working at the intersection of mathematics, computer science and biology to develop new data driven technologies to advance the discovery of new biomarkers and precision based therapies. His research contributions include the development of methods for multiscale analysis of molecular networks and integrative methods for biomarker discovery from multidimensional data. He has co authored over 20 research papers published in scientific journals including Nature Biotechnology, Science and Cell.

Okan Ekinci

Biography
Okan Ekinci, MD, MBA, is the Head of Digital Technology and Chief Medical Information Officer at Roche Information Solutions. He joined Roche in 2018 and served as Chief Medical Officer and Senior Vice President of Marketing & Innovation for the digital health business. Before that, Okan held various positions at Siemens Healthineers, including Chief Medical Officer and Head of Healthcare Consulting. Drawing on extensive experience across imaging, diagnostics, and pharma, he has advised healthcare institutions and governments on strategies for digital transformation, personalized healthcare, and artificial intelligence. Okan is a cardiologist by training and an adjunct professor of medicine at the University College Dublin.