STPF SPECIAL EVENT

Healthcare, Equity, & AI: Navigating Policy Challenges & Opportunities

Artificial Intelligence Series

The AAAS S&T Policy Fellowships (STPF) is hosting a special virtual panel discussion – Healthcare, Equity, & AI: Navigating Policy Challenges & Opportunities. This discussion continues our series of events focusing on AI policy development. We hope you can join us!

Event Information

Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) have spurred dynamic policy conversations around innovation, regulation, security, risk, equity, ethics and many other issues. In these quickly evolving and complex policy conversations, concerns around equity in the development and deployment of AI are paramount. 

Join us for a thought-provoking panel discussion and explore the intersection of equity, artificial intelligence, and healthcare. This session will address the role of policy in shaping equitable AI applications in healthcare, accessible and affordable AI-driven healthcare solutions, and the importance of involving underrepresented communities in the development and deployment of AI technologies. Our panel of scientists and policy experts will discuss the complexities of using AI in healthcare and explore potential insights for addressing equity concerns when deploying AI in other areas. 

The STPF community is invited to this event, including current fellows, alumni, and partners.

Event Format: Virtual

By registering for this event, participants acknowledge and agree to the AAAS policies and health and safety guidelines available here: https://www.aaas.org/events/policies

Date: Thursday, April 18
Time: 1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.
Location: Virtual

Speakers Include

Dr. Melissa Laitner

Melissa Laitner, Ph.D., is a Senior Program Officer and Special Assistant to the President of the National Academy of Medicine. Previously, she was a Health Science Policy Analyst in the NIH Immediate Office of the Director. In this role, she supported the Acting Deputy Director of the NIH and provided guidance and oversight across a wide range of programs, including the NIH Maternal Mortality Task Force, the UNITE Initiative, and Congressional reporting on behalf of the NIH Office of the Director.

Prior to her arrival at the NIH, Laitner was Director of Public Policy and Government Affairs at the Society for Women’s Health Research, where she headed regulatory and legislative efforts. From 2018-2019, Melissa worked as an American Association for the Advancement of Science health policy fellow in the US Senate.

Melissa is a clinical health psychologist with expertise in the assessment and treatment of behavioral and mental health impacts of complex medical diagnoses. She completed her graduate and postgraduate training at the University of Florida and her undergraduate degree at the University of South Carolina. 

Dr. Rebecca Rosen

Rebecca Rosen, Ph.D., is the director of the Office of Data Science and Sharing at NICHD, where she oversees responsible use of data and biospecimens generated by the NICHD community. She also is the product owner for the NIH Researcher Auth Service (RAS), a resource for centralized and secure identity and access management across the NIH research data ecosystem.  

Previously, Dr. Rosen was a Senior Advisor in the Office of Technology Development and Coordination at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the program lead for the NIMH Data Archive (NDA). NDA, NIMH’s single data repository for human subjects data, securely makes available for secondary analysis clinical, phenotypic, imaging, and -omics data from more than half a million research participants.

Prior to joining NIH, Dr. Rosen was a Research Assistant Professor at New York University’s (NYU) Institute for the Study of Decision Making and chief data officer for the Human Project. She also was Associate Director for Data Resources and Data Strategy at NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress. Before joining NYU, Dr. Rosen co-founded the Center for the Science of Science & Innovation Policy at the American Institutes for Research, working with U.S. and international science funders to build data platforms for research management. She has been a Policy Analyst at both the National Science Foundation and NIH. Dr. Rosen earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Emory University and a B.S. in psychobiology from Yale University.

Dr. Suchi Saria

Suchi Saria, Ph.D., holds the John C. Malone endowed chair and is the Director of AI and health lab at Johns Hopkins. She is also the Founder of Bayesian Health, a leading clinical AI platform company spun out of her university research. Her methods research has focused on solving challenges in ensuring safe real-world translation of AI in high-stakes applications, multi-modal time series modeling, and causal and counterfactual reasoning for time series data. Her applied research has built on these technical advances to develop novel next generation diagnostic and treatment planning tools that use AI/statistical learning methods to individualize care.

Her work has been funded by leading organizations including the NSF, DARPA, FDA, NIH and CDC and featured by the Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, Bloomberg News, Wall Street Journal, and PBS NOVA to name a few. She has won several awards for excellence in AI and care delivery. For example, for her academic work, she’s been recognized as IEEE’s “AI’s 10 to Watch”, Sloan Fellow, MIT Tech Review’s “35 Under 35”, National Academy of Medicine (NAM)’s list of “Emerging Leaders in Health and Medicine”, and DARPA’s Rising Star awardee.

For her work in industry bringing AI to healthcare, she’s been recognized as World Economic Forum’s 100 Brilliant Minds Under 40, Rock Health’s “Top 50 in Digital Health”, Modern Healthcare’s Top 25 Innovators, The Armstrong Award for Excellence in Quality and Safety. She's given over 300 invited talks and keynotes, is on the editorial board of the Journal of Machine Learning Research, has co-authored NAM's "Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare: the Hope, the Hype, the Promise, the Peril" and is currently serving on NAM's AI Code of Conduct and Coalition of Health AI’s board of directors. 
Dr. Jayashree Kalpathy-Cramer
Jayashree Kalpathy-Cramer is an endowed chair in Ophthalmic data sciences and the founding chief of the Division of Artificial Medical Intelligence in the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Colorado (CU) School of Medicine. She leads the development and translation of novel artificial intelligence (AI) methods into effective patient care practices at the Sue Anschutz - Rodgers Eye Center. Previously, she was an associate Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School where she was actively involved in data science activities with a focus on medical imaging. Her research interests span the spectrum from novel algorithm development to clinical deployment. She is passionate about the potential that machine learning and artificial intelligence have to improve the access and the quality of healthcare in the US and worldwide. Dr. Kalpathy-Cramer has authored over 250 peer-reviewed publications, has written over a dozen book chapters and is a co-inventor on a dozen patents. She graduated from IIT Bombay, India, with a degree in electrical engineering and received her PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, also in Electrical Engineering. She returned to academia after almost a decade in the semiconductor industry with a research pivot towards healthcare.