Thematic Session Speakers

  • Ghassemi, Marzyeh

    Marzyeh Ghassemi, PhD, Associate Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Institute for Medical Engineering & Science (IMES) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

    About: Dr. Marzyeh Ghassemi is an Associate Professor at MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Institute for Medical Engineering & Science (IMES). She holds MIT affiliations with the Jameel Clinic, LIDS, IDSS, and CSAIL. For examples of short- and long-form talks Professor Ghassemi has given, see her Forbes lightning talk, and her ICML keynote.

    Professor Ghassemi holds a Germeshausen Career Development Professorship, and was named a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar and one of MIT Tech Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35. In 2024, she received an NSF CAREER award, and Google Research Scholar Award. Prior to her PhD in Computer Science at MIT, she received an MSc. degree in biomedical engineering from Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar, and B.S. degrees in computer science and electrical engineering as a Goldwater Scholar at New Mexico State University.

    Professor Ghassemi work spans computer science and clinical venues, including NeurIPS, KDD, AAAI, MLHC, JAMIA, JMIR, JMLR, AMIA-CRI, Nature Medicine, Nature Translational Psychiatry, and Critical Care. Her work has been featured in popular press such as MIT News, The Boston Globe, and The Huffington Post.

     

  • Kahana, Michael

    Michael Kahana, PhD, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Psychology at theUniversity of Pennsylvania; CEO at nia Therapeutics

    About: Michael Kahana is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. For three decades, he has studied human memory and its neural basis using behavioral, computational, and electrophysiological methods. Kahana is the author of more than 230 peer-reviewed journal articles, co-editor of the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Memory, and author of “Foundations of Human Memory,” also published by Oxford University Press. 

    In 2002, Kahana and his then-graduate student, Marc Howard, published their retrieved-context theory of episodic memory, which has become one of the most widely cited and actively developed theories of memory. Kahana and his early trainees, including Dan Rizzuto, pioneered the study of human memory electrophysiology in neurosurgical patients undergoing invasive electrode monitoring. This work identified and characterized the functional role of theta oscillations in the human brain. Kahana and his students discovered and documented the properties of place cells, grid cells, goal cells and most recently time cells using single unit recording methods in collaboration with Dr. Itzhak Fried of UCLA. Kahana’s group also used the high spatial and temporal resolution of direct brain recordings to identify patterns of brain network activity underlying successful memory encoding, retrieval, and reinstatement. 

    Seeking to apply his basic research to the treatment of memory loss, Kahana and Nia Therapeutics co-founder, Dr. Dan Rizzuto, embarked on an ambitious program to build the world’s largest dataset examining the effect of electrical stimulation on memory and its neural correlates. This $30M project, funded under the cross-agency Human Brain Initiative, led to numerous discoveries about the neural basis of human memory and the use of neuromodulation to manipulate memory function in the brain. 

    Kahana is presently on leave from the University of Pennsylvania, working at Nia Therapeutics. His goal is to initiate a feasibility study to evaluate the safety and efficacy of AI-guided closed-loop neurostimulation for treating memory loss in patients with traumatic brain injury. 

    Kahana has received several major awards for his research, including the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences, the inaugural Mid-Career Award from the Psychonomic Society, the Howard Crosby Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Grossman Award from the Society of Neurological Surgeons. 

     

  • Sliwinski, Martin J.

    Martin J. Sliwinski, PhD, Director of the Center for Healthy Aging, Gregory H. Wolf Professor of Aging Studies, Director of the Penn State Geroscience and Dementia Prevention Consortium, and Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State University

    About: Dr. Sliwinski’s work focuses on improving the measurement of cognitive change with applications in cognitive aging and dementia prevention. His research explores how fluctuations in cognitive performance—shaped by factors such as stress, social interactions, and physical activity—can reveal early signs of cognitive decline and inform strategies for maintaining brain health. Dr. Sliwinski has led the development of innovative methods for assessing cognition in real-world settings, including the Mobile Monitoring of Cognitive Change (M2C2) platform, which leverages mobile technology to capture high-frequency, in-the-moment cognitive data. His research emphasizes dynamic phenotyping of daily experiences and cognitive function, examining their inter-relationships across multiple timescales, from micro-changes over days to long-term trajectories over years. By embedding ambulatory cognitive assessments into ecological momentary assessment (EMA) and daily diary designs, his projects capture frequent, real-time snapshots of cognitive function, behavior, psychological states, and environmental exposures in people’s natural environments, advancing tools for monitoring and promoting cognitive health. 

     

     

  • Smoller, Jordan

    Jordan Smoller, MD, ScD, lead PI of the New England Precision Medicine Consortium as part of the NIH All of Us Research Program and co-Chair of the All of Us Science Committee; Jerrold F. Rosenbaum Endowed Chair in Psychiatry at Mass General Hospital; Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School; Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health

    About: Jordan Smoller, MD, ScD is a psychiatrist, epidemiologist, and geneticist whose research focus has been understanding the genetic and environmental determinants of psychiatric disorders across the lifespan and using big data to advance precision mental health including improved methods to reduce risk and enhance resilience.   

    Dr. Smoller is the Jerrold F. Rosenbaum Endowed Chair in Psychiatry, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. He is Associate Chief for Research in the MGH Department of Psychiatry, Director of the Center for Precision Psychiatry, Director of the Psychiatric and Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit in the MGH Center for Genomic Medicine, and co-Director of the Center for Suicide Research and Prevention at MGH and Harvard. Dr. Smoller is a Tepper Family MGH Research Scholar, Director of the Omics Unit of the MGH Division of Clinical Research, co-Director of the Mass General Brigham Training Program in Precision and Genomic Medicine, and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute, of MIT and Harvard. 

    He has played a leading role in national and international efforts to advance precision medicine. He is a Principal Investigator (PI) in the eMERGE (Electronic Medical Records and Genomics) network, founding PI of the PsycheMERGE Consortium and lead PI of the New England Precision Medicine Consortium as part of the NIH All of UsResearch Program.  Dr. Smoller is an author of more than 600 scientific publications and is also the author of The Other Side of Normal (HarperCollins/William Morrow, 2012). 

     

  • Walsh, Conor

    Conor Walsh, PhD, Paul A. Maeder Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the John A. Paulson Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Founder Harvard Biodesign Lab

    About: Conor Walsh is the Paul A. Maeder Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the John A. Paulson Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and an Associate Faculty Member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. He is the is the founder of the Harvard Biodesign Lab, which brings together researchers from the engineering, industrial design, apparel, biomechanics, physical therapy and business communities to develop and translate new disruptive robotic technologies for augmenting and restoring human performance. Example application areas include, enhancing the mobility of healthy individuals, restoring the mobility of patients with gait deficits, assisting those with upper extremity weakness to perform activities of daily living and preventing injuries of workers performing physically strenuous tasks.

    His multidisciplinary research spans engineering, biology and medicine and has led to multiple high impact scientific papers. The soft exosuit technology is now commercially available in clinics for gait retraining through a collaboration with ReWalk Robotics and a lab spin-out, Verve Motion, has launched a back assist product for workers performing physically strenuous tasks in industry. He has been invited to give talks at government, industry and academic events and has served on research review panels including the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health. He is dedicated to training the next generation of biomedical engineering innovators and lab alumni have gone on to successful careers in academia, entrepreneurship, and high tech R&D positions in industry.

    Additionally, he co-founded the Soft Robotics Toolkit that serves as a platform the lab’s extensive STEM outreach activities. He is the winner of multiple awards including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the Early Academic Career Award in Robotics and Automation from the IEEE RAS, the National Science Foundation Career Award and the MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35 Award.

     

  • Weber, Griffin

    Griffin Weber, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Informatics at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School

    About: Griffin M Weber, MD, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Informatics at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Harvard Medical School (HMS). He is also the Faculty Lead of Harvard’s Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) Informatics Program and Director of the Biomedical Research Informatics Core (BRIC) at BIDMC. Dr. Weber helped develop Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2), an open-source platform for query and analysis of clinical data, and the Shared Health Research Information Network (SHRINE), which connects i2b2 and OMOP databases across organizations to form federated research data networks. He also created the Profiles RNS website, which is used by dozens of medical schools and research organizations to create searchable online profiles of their investigators. Dr. Weber is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (FACMI), in recognition of his contributions to the field of medical informatics.