Ava Soleimany – Engineering Solutions for Precision Medicine: From Personalized Sensing to Guided Therapeutic Discovery

Abstract:
Precision medicine envisions a world where diagnostic and therapeutic opportunities are intelligently tailored to individual patient needs. Achieving this vision necessitates the pioneering of new engineered technologies, grounded in biology, to accurately capture individualized information about disease state, identify causal drivers of disease, and scale generative therapy design for any individual.

In this talk, I will discuss my work in engineering a novel class of nanoparticle sensors that produce dynamic, noninvasive, and personalized measurements of disease activity from deep within the body. Our technology has opened new avenues for rich and biologically-grounded data generation, thereby powering the design and deployment of high-fidelity machine learning algorithms for the early detection and monitoring of disease. As a step towards closing the precision medicine loop by automatically optimizing candidate therapies, I will highlight work on the principled design of an uncertainty-aware, learning-based algorithm for guided therapeutic discovery. Finally, I will conclude with future directions and outstanding challenges that inspire an engineering approach to personalize disease management.

Bio:
Ava Soleimany is a Senior Researcher in the Biomedical Machine Learning group at Microsoft Research, New England. Her research focuses on developing new engineering and computational solutions for problems critical to precision medicine, where she works at the interface of biological systems, nanotechnology, and machine learning. She completed her PhD in Biophysics at Harvard University and her SB in Computer Science and Molecular Biology at MIT. She was a lead instructor and organizer of MIT Introduction to Deep Learning from 2017 to 2022. Soleimany has been awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, the AMITA Senior Academic Award, as well as the 2016 Henry Ford II Scholar Award, in recognition of being the individual student with the highest academic standing in the School of Engineering at MIT.

Details

• Date: Tuesday, March 22
• Time: 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
• Category: Special Seminar
• Location: Grier A (34-401A)

Host

• Elfar Adalsteinsson
• Email: chadcoll@mit.edu