Artificial Intelligence in Medicine: Opportunities and Challenges
Health care sits at the epicenter of recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI). In current years, research on AI applications in medicine has grown dramatically, reflecting both genuine opportunities for social benefit and persistent challenges in translating innovation into meaningful clinical impact.
AI has the potential to automate routine tasks, learn from large-scale patient data, advance precision medicine, and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of health care delivery. At the same time, enthusiasm for AI has contributed to inflated expectations and created an environment in which the quality, validity, and real-world relevance of research has been called into question.
This full-day conference brings together leaders in AI, medicine, ethics, law, and policy to examine where AI systems have delivered value, where they have fallen short, and what is required to responsibly realize their potential to improve the safety, quality, and equity of health care.
Keynote Speaker
John D. Halamka | President, Mayo Clinic Platform
, M.D., M.S., is president of the Mayo Clinic Platform, a digital initiative that brings together solution developers, data partners and healthcare service providers to transform healthcare. Today, Mayo Clinic Platform tools and solutions reach more than 54 million people globally.
Trained in emergency medicine and medical informatics, Dr. Halamka has been developing and implementing healthcare information strategy and policy for more than 40 years. Prior to his appointment at Mayo Clinic, he was chief information officer at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where he served governments, academia and industry throughout the world. As the International Healthcare Innovation Professor at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Halamka helped the George W. Bush administration, the Obama administration and governments worldwide plan their healthcare information strategies.
Dr. Halamka completed his undergraduate studies at Stanford University, earned his medical degree at the University of California, San Francisco, and pursued graduate work in bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He completed his residency at Harbor — UCLA Medical Center in the Department of Emergency Medicine. He continues to practice emergency medicine and is Professor of Emergency Medicine and the Michael D. Brennan, M.D., President’s Strategic Initiative Professor at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science.
Dr. Halamka has written 16 books and hundreds of articles. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2020 and serves on a number of boards, including the Coalition for Health AI, Vizient and the Milken Institute’s FasterCures Advisory Board. He and his wife run Unity Farm Sanctuary in Sherborn, Massachusetts, dedicated to the lifetime care of ill, disabled, senior, orphaned and surrendered farm animals.
Session 1: Understanding Special Challenges Developing AI for Health Care
Hana El-Samad | Senior Vice President and Director, Institute of Computation, Altos Labs
Hana El-Samad is an internationally recognized scientist-engineer, systems thinker, and organizational builder pioneering the integration of AI, computation, and experimental biology. She is Senior Vice President and Director of the Institute of Computation at Altos Labs, where she built and leads an organization of scientists and engineers developing AI/ML capabilities for biological and therapeutic discovery. Her portfolio spans molecular AI, cell-state and multiscale modeling, AI-guided phenotyping, multimodal data integration, lab-in-the-loop approaches that connect computational predictions directly to experimental testing, as well as translational AI. Previously, as SVP and Director of SI3 (now, the Institute of Technology) and a Founding Principal Investigator at Altos, she created a multidisciplinary technology organization bringing together genomics, high-content imaging, proteomics, in vivo science, bioinformatics, histology, and data engineering—establishing the experimental and data foundation required for AI-enabled discovery at scale. Across these roles, she has set scientific and technology strategy, recruited senior leaders, built cross-functional organizations, and created operating models that translate ambitious research into durable capabilities relevant to aging, age-related disease, and drug discovery. Her industry leadership is grounded in a distinguished scientific career in academia advancing systems and control approaches to biology, synthetic biology, genomics, cell engineering, and de novo protein design. Prior to joining Altos Labs, Dr. El-Samad was the Kuo Family Endowed Professor and Vice Chair in the department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco. She is Editor-in-Chief of GEN Biotechnology, and her honors include a Packard Fellowship, the Paul G. Allen Distinguished Investigator Award, the Donald P. Eckman Award, the Byers Award in Basic Science, Cell’s “40 Under 40,” and election to AIMBE.
Mark Sendak | Founder and CEO, Vega Health
, MD, MPP, is the Founder and CEO of Vega Health, the trusted partner for health systems working to identify, integrate, and scale best-in-class AI solutions. Vega Health offers a proprietary platform installed in healthcare organizations’ local environments; a curated marketplace of validated AI solutions; and comprehensive implementation, evaluation, and monitoring services, all designed to ensure health systems realize real-world value from AI.
Mark previously served as Population Health & Data Science Lead at Duke Institute for Health Innovation and co-founded the Health AI Partnership, a learning collaborative advancing responsible AI use in healthcare delivery. He has integrated dozens of AI solutions into clinical operations and is a co-inventor of software to scale machine learning applications and real-world evidence generation across health systems.
Mark and his team have published over 50 manuscripts in top journals and have had work featured in The Wall Street Journal, MIT Technology Review, Wired, and STAT News. He has served as an advisor to national organizations, including the American Medical Association, AARP, American Board of Family Medicine, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Session 2: Promoting Benefit and Avoiding Harm
S. Matthew Liao | Professor of Bioethics and Director, Center for Bioethics, New York University
Matthew Liao is Arthur Zitrin Chair of Bioethics, Director of the Center for Bioethics, Professor of Global Public Health, and Affiliated Professor in the Department of Philosophy at New York University. He is the author or editor of The Right to Be Loved (Oxford University Press); Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (Oxford University Press); Moral Brains: The Neuroscience of Morality (Oxford University Press); The Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights (Oxford University Press); Current Controversies in Bioethics (Routledge), and over 70 articles in philosophy and bioethics. He has given TED and TEDx talks in New York and CERN, Switzerland, and he has been featured in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, the BBC, Harper’s Magazine, Sydney Morning Herald, Scientific American and other media outlets. He is the Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Moral Philosophy, a peer-reviewed international journal of moral, political and legal philosophy.
Brad Malin | Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Vice Chair for Research, Vanderbilt University Medical Center
, Ph.D., is the Accenture Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Biostatistics, and Computer Science at Vanderbilt University, as well as Vice Chair for Research Affairs in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where he co-directs ADVANCE AI Center. His research is in computational methods and infrastructure to enable broad data sharing and development of machine learned systems that are cognizant of their ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI). He has led various grants from the NIH, NSF, PCORI, and ARPA-H, and he currently leads the NIH’s flagship AI programs, AIM-AHEAD, where he leads the Optimization Core, and Bridge2AI, where he leads the Ethical and Trustworthy AI Core. He recently completed a five-year appointment on the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and is currently part of the Speaker Program of the U.S. State Department. He also served as a consultant to the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, assisting in the development of guidance regarding de-identification in accordance with the HIPAA Privacy Rule. Among various honors, he is an elected fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine (NAM), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI), the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the International Academy for Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI). He was also a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from the White House. He is an alumni of 天美传媒, holding a B.S. in biological sciences, an M.Phil. in Public Policy & Management, an M.S. in Machine Learning, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science.
Jenna Wiens | Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Michigan
Jenna Wiens is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), Associate Director of the Artificial Intelligence Lab, and Co-director of AI & Digital Health Innovation at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her primary research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning and healthcare. Wiens received her PhD from MIT in 2014, received an NSF CAREER award in 2016, was named to the MIT Tech Review’s list of Innovators Under 35 in 2017, was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship in Computer Science in 2020, and most recently, received a Humboldt Research Award in recognition of her career achievements to date.
Session 3: Making AI That Works for Everyone
Kadija Ferryman | Faculty, Berman Institute of Bioethics; Assistant Professor, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
is an anthropologist who studies race, ethics, and policy in health technology. Specifically, her research examines how clinical racial correction/norming, algorithmic risk scoring, and disease prediction in genomics, digital medical records, and artificial intelligence technologies affect racial health inequities. She is currently Faculty at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University.
Judy Wawira Gichoya | Professor of Radiology, Emory University
is the William and Kay Casarella Professor of Radiology at Emory university and leads the HITI (Healthcare AI Innovation and Translational Informatics) lab . Her work is centered around using data science to study health equity. Her group works in 4 areas - building diverse datasets for machine learning (for example the Emory Breast dataset); evaluating AI for bias and fairness; validating AI in the real world setting and training the next generation of data scientists (both clinical and technical students) through hive learning and village mentoring. She serves as the program director for radiology:AI trainee editorial board and the Emory University medical students machine learning elective. She has mentored over 60 students across the world (now successful faculty, post doc, PHD and industry employees) from several institutions around the world. She has received several awards including the most influential radiology researcher in 2022, and was a 2023 Emerging Scholar in the National Academy of Medicine.
Sharona Hoffman | Distinguished University Professor of Law and Bioethics, Case Western University
is a Distinguished University Professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. She joined the faculty in 1999 and is now the Edgar A. Hahn Professor of Law, Professor of Bioethics, and Co-Director of the Law School’s Law-Medicine Center. She was elected to membership in the American Law Institute in 2017.
Professor Hoffman has published over eighty articles and book chapters on health law and civil rights issues as well as dozens of opinion and other short pieces. She has developed particular expertise and a national reputation in the areas of health information technology, medical privacy law, and aging. Her work has appeared in the Georgetown Law Journal, William & Mary Law Review, and Boston College Law Review, among many other journals. She is also the author of two books: Aging with a Plan: How a Little Thought Today Can Vastly Improve Your Tomorrow and Electronic Health Records and Medical Big Data: Law and Policy.
In 2021, she won the university-wide CWRU Faculty Distinguished Research Award. In 2026, HeinOnline listed her as the 25th most cited health law scholar in the United States. Professor Hoffman has lectured throughout the United States and internationally and has been widely quoted in the press.
Session 4: Ensuring Responsibility and Accountability
Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo | Editor in Chief, JAMA and the JAMA Network; Professor of Medicine, UC San Francisco
, PhD, MD, MAS is the 17th Editor in Chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and the JAMA Network. She is the Lee Goldman, MD Endowed Professor of Medicine and Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Bibbins-Domingo is a general internist, cardiovascular disease epidemiologist, and a national leader in prevention and interventions to address health disparities.
Megan Palmer | Senior Advisor for National Security and Technology Strategy, ARPA-H
is an expert and leader in strategies to shape the responsible development of critical and emerging technologies, with a focus on biotechnology. She serves as Senior Advisor to the Director for National Security and Technology Strategy at the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), where she advises agency leadership on promoting and protecting U.S. leadership in health-relevant science and technology, including national security and competitiveness strategy, responsible innovation in program design, and implementation of research security, biosecurity, and related policy requirements. She previously served as the agency's inaugural Lead for Responsible Innovation, ensuring ARPA-H's investments in breakthrough health innovations aligned with public interests.
Before ARPA-H, Dr. Palmer was Senior Director of Public Impact at Ginkgo Bioworks, where she translated the company's commitment to responsible use of its synthetic biology and biosecurity platform into operational strategy. Concurrently, she served as staff designee to the chair of the U.S. National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology.
At Stanford University, Dr. Palmer founded and directed the Bio Policy & Leadership in Society (Bio.Polis) Initiative, led biosecurity initiatives as a Senior Research Scholar and William J. Perry Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), and was an adjunct professor in the Department of Bioengineering.
Dr. Palmer co-chaired the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Synthetic Biology, led social responsibility programs for the international Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition for a decade, and served as Deputy Director of Policy and Practices for the NSF Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (Synberc). She has served on the boards of the iGEM Foundation and Revive & Restore and currently serves on the WEF Global Future Council on Generative Biology.
Dr. Palmer holds a Ph.D. in Biological Engineering from MIT and a B.Sc.E. in Engineering Chemistry from Queen's University.
