Today, University of Toronto Assistant Professor of the departments of computer science and medicine, Marzyeh Ghassemi, has been named to MIT Technology Review’s prestigious annual list of Innovators Under 35 as a visionary. For over a decade, the global media company has recognized a list of exceptionally talented technologists whose work has great potential to transform the world.
Ghassemi, who joins U of T later this summer, is a recent PhD graduate from MIT. She is currently a visiting researcher with Alphabet’s Verily (a Google company) and a part-time postdoc at MIT. Her hiring at U of T signals a new partnership between computer science and medicine: She is the first joint hire in computational medicine.
“U of T’s computer science department has established experts in machine learning,” said Ghassemi, “as well as really exciting junior faculty doing work in important areas of machine learning like Raquel [Urtasun] and driverless vehicles."
In addition to its machine learning expertise, the ability to work with “world-class clinical collaborators” at U of T’s nine partner hospitals was another important draw for Ghassemi.
“All of the people I met at the Faculty of Medicine were excited to work on clinically meaningful problems,” she said. “They really wanted to understand how we could apply machine learning techniques and develop new algorithms to be useful in a clinical setting. That combination of a fantastic technical school and a collaborative, world-class clinical environment is pretty rare.”
Ghassemi will also join the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
Gideon Lichfield, editor-in-chief of MIT Technology Review, said: “MIT Technology Review inherently focuses on technology first – the breakthroughs and their potential to disrupt our lives. Our annual Innovators Under 35 list is a chance for us to honor the outstanding people behind those technologies. We hope these profiles offer a glimpse into what the face of technology looks like today as well as in the future.”
Learn more about this year’s honorees on the MIT Technology Review website. The print issue will hit newsstands worldwide on July 3. The honorees are also invited to appear in person at the upcoming EmTech MIT conference, MIT Technology Review’s flagship event exploring future trends and technologies that will impact the global economy, happening September 11-14, 2018 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
With files from Jennifer Robinson