Mihaela van der Schaar

Learning Engines for Healthcare: Using Machine Learning to Transform Clinical Practice and Discovery

Professor van der Schaar is John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Medicine at the University of Cambridge and a Turing Faculty Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute in London, where she leads the effort on data science and machine learning for personalized medicine. Prior to this, she was a Chancellor's Professor at UCLA and MAN Professor of Quantitative Finance at University of Oxford. She is an IEEE Fellow (2009). She has received the Oon Prize on Preventative Medicine from the University of Cambridge (2018). She has also been the recipient of an NSF Career Award, 3 IBM Faculty Awards, the IBM Exploratory Stream Analytics Innovation Award, the Philips Make a Difference Award and several best paper awards, including the IEEE Darlington Award. She holds 33 granted USA patents. Her current research focus is on data science and machine learning for medicine and education. 

The overarching goal of her research is to develop cutting-edge machine learning, AI and operations research theory, methods, algorithms and systems to understand the basis of health and disease; develop methodology to catalyze clinical research; support clinical decisions through individualized medicine; inform clinical pathways, better utilize resources & reduce costs; and inform public health.

To do this, she is creating what she call Learning Engines for Healthcare (LEH’s). An LEH is an integrated ecosystem that uses machine learning, AI and operations research to provide clinical insights and healthcare intelligence to all the stakeholders (patients, clinicians, hospitals, administrators). In contrast to an Electronic Health Record, which provides a static, passive, isolated display of information, an LEH provides dynamic, active, holistic & individualized display of information including alerts.

Event information can be found here.