Prof. Ben Reis is the Director of the Predictive Medicine Group at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital.
His research focuses on understanding the fundamental patterns of human disease and on developing novel AI systems for predicting disease. He has created systems that allow doctors to predict dangerous clinical conditions years in advance, including suicide, domestic abuse, and life-threatening drug side-effects. He has conducted large-scale epidemiological studies of vaccine effectiveness and safety, and developed novel methods for tracking and understanding pandemics through digital information sources. He has worked with the CDC to develop technologies for the national US public health surveillance system, and has advised governments worldwide on developing real-time public health systems, including systems to protect the Olympic Games against bioterrorist threats.
He has been honored at the White House for his work on harnessing social networks to promote health, and was named a leading global health innovator by the US State Department, USAID and NASA. His research has been published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Science, and Nature Medicine, and featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Time Magazine. Prof. Reis studied computer science and artificial intelligence at MIT and received his doctorate in artificial intelligence from the University of Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar. He completed his postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School as an NIH Fellow in Health Informatics, researching the dynamics of genetic expression networks. He previously worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company, and as manager at the Markle Foundation’s Health and Technology program.