The Dr. Daniel C. Andreae President’s Lecture on the Future of Work is a signature, endowed annual lecture series that features a distinguished speaker with a unique and important perspective related to educating for the future of the health professions.

This year, we will be featuring Dr. Marzyeh Ghassemi, whose focus is on creating and applying machine learning to understand and improve health in ways that are robust, private and fair. Health is important, and improvements in health improve lives. However, we still don’t fundamentally understand what it means to be healthy, and the same patient may receive different treatments across different hospitals or clinicians as new evidence is discovered, or individual illness is interpreted.

Unlike many problems in machine learning - games like Go, self-driving cars, object recognition - disease management does not have well-defined rewards that can be used to learn rules. Models must also be “healthy”, in that they should not learn biased rules or recommendations that harm minorities or minoritized populations. The Healthy ML group tackles the many novel technical opportunities for machine learning in health, and works to make important progress with careful application to this domain.