Speaker Profile
Ph.D., Associate Professor of Biomedical Data Science, Stanford U.
Biography
James an Associate Professor of Biomedical Data Science and, by courtesy, of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. James works on making AImore reliable, human-compatible and statistically rigorous, and am especially interested in applications in human disease and health. James received his Ph.D from Harvard in 2014, and was at one time a member of Microsoft Research, a Gates Scholar at Cambridge and a Simons fellow at U.C. Berkeley. James joined Stanford in 2016 and am excited to also be a Chan-Zuckerberg Investigator. We are also a part of the Stanford AI Lab. His research is supported by two Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator Awards, the Sloan Fellowship, the NSF CAREER Award, a Top Ten Clinical Achievement Award and faculty awards from Google, Adobe and Amazon.
Session Abstract – PMWC 2026 Silicon Valley
Track Co-Chairs:
Gad Getz, Broad Institute
Alex Morgan, Khosla Ventures
PMWC Award Ceremony Honoree
• Greg Brockman, President & Co-Founder, OpenAI
• Steve Wozniak, Co-Founder, Apple
Keynote
• Vinod Khosla, Khosla Ventures
Target Discovery: Beyond Genomics – Revealing Hidden Layers of Biology with AI
• Keynote: Stephen Quake, CZ Biohub
• Aritro Nath, City of Hope
• Massa Shoura, Phinomics
• Omar Serang, DNAnexus
Illuminating Drug Discovery: AI Models That Learn From Biology
• Erwin Estigarribia, HEADLAMP Health
Harmonizing the Data Economy: Enabling AI Across Institutions and Therapeutic Areas
• Noah Nasser, Datma
Can AI Really Create the Next Blockbuster Drug?
• James Zou, Stanford
Interpretable AI for Biomarker Discovery: Accelerating Drug Development
• Chair: Rajat Roy, PATHOMIQ INC
Closing the Loop: AI in the Messy Middle of Drug Development
• Ari Caroline, Weave Bio
• Dina Katabi, Emerald / MIT
Is AI the New Drug?
• Michael J. Kahana, Nia Therapeutics
