Artificial Intelligence and Health: Promise and Pitfalls

David Cutler has developed an impressive record of achievement in both academia and the public sector. He served as Assistant Professor of Economics from 1991 to 1995, was named John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Social Sciences in 1995, and received tenure in 1997. He is currently the Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics in the Department of Economics and was named Harvard College Professor in 2014 until 2019.  Professor Cutler holds secondary appointments at the Kennedy School of Government and the School of Public Health.  Professor Cutler was associate dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for Social Sciences from 2003-2008.

Honored for his scholarly work and singled out for outstanding mentorship of graduate students, Professor Cutler’s work in health economics and public economics has earned him significant academic and public acclaim. Professor Cutler served on the Council of Economic Advisers and the National Economic Council during the Clinton Administration and has advised the Presidential campaigns of Bill Bradley, John Kerry, and Barack Obama as well as being Senior Health Care Advisor for the Obama Presidential Campaign. Among other affiliations, Professor Cutler has held positions with the National Institutes of Health and the National Academy of Sciences. Currently, Professor Cutler is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member of the National Academy of Medicine. He advises many companies and groups on health care.

Professor Cutler was a key advisor in the formulation of the recent cost control legislation in Massachusetts, and is one of the members of the Health Policy Commission created to help reduce medical spending in that state.

Professor Cutler is author of three books, several chapters in edited books, and many published papers on the topics of health care and other public policy topics.   Author of Your Money Or Your Life: Strong Medicine for America’s Health Care System, published by Oxford University Press, this book, and Professor Cutler’s ideas, were the subject of a feature article in the New York Times Magazine,The Quality Cure, by Roger Lowenstein. Cutler’s book, The Quality Cure, pursues these themes.  Cutler recently completed a book on Survival of the City, examining how cities need to and can adapt to pandemics and other threats. Cutler was recently named one of the 30 people who could have a powerful impact on healthcare by Modern Healthcare magazine and one of the 50 most influential men aged 45 and younger by Details magazine.

Professor Cutler received an AB from Harvard University (1987) and a PhD in Economics from MIT (1991).

Widely known for her research at the intersection of science, technology, and politics,  Alondra Nelson holds the Harold F. Linder Chair in the School of Social Science. Past president of the Social Science Research Council, she was professor of sociology at Columbia University, and also served as the inaugural Dean of Social Science. As Dean, she led the first strategic planning process for the social sciences at Columbia, working with faculty to envision and set long-term research priorities. Nelson began her academic career on the faculty of Yale University, where she received the Poorvu Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching Excellence.

From 2021–23, she was deputy assistant to President Joe Biden, and acting director and principal deputy director for science and society of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Nelson was the first person to serve in the latter role, which brought social science expertise explicitly into the work of federal science and technology strategy and policy. Including Nelson in the list of Ten People Who Shaped Science in 2022, Nature said of her OSTP tenure, “this social scientist made strides for equity, integrity and open access.” In 2023, she was included in the inaugural TIME100 list of the most influential people in AI.

In October 2023, she was nominated by the White House, and then appointed by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, to serve on the UN High-level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence.

Nelson’s research offers a critical and innovative approach to the social sciences in fruitful dialogue with other disciplines. Her major research contributions are situated at the intersection of racial formation and social citizenship, on the one hand, and emerging scientific and technological phenomena, on the other. She connects these dimensions in award-winning and acclaimed books, including The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome (2016); Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (2011); Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race and History (2012; with Keith Wailoo and Catherine Lee); and Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life (2001; with Thuy Linh Tu). Nelson is currently completing books on science and technology policy in the Obama-Biden and Biden-Harris administrations. She is also at work on Society after Pandemic, a series of essays exploring how the social conditions exposed, exacerbated, and created by the introduction of the novel coronavirus compel reconsideration of prevailing ideas of society, institutions, technology, justice, and democracy.

Nelson is a distinguished senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

She has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Science, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Philosophical Society, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the National Academy of Medicine.

Raised in Southern California, Nelson received her BA from the University of California, San Diego, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She earned her PhD from New York University in 2003.

Greg Singleton is a visionary federal leader and technology expert with over 20 years of public, private, and academic sector experience delivering meaningful results for the American public.  Greg is the Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer (CAIO) at the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) where he is leading the Department’s efforts to supercharge government and private industry health efforts through the safe and responsible use of artificial intelligence.  Under his leadership, the Department has tripled its reported uses of artificial intelligence and taken a lead on critical Administration transparency and non-discrimination priorities.  In prior roles at HHS Greg led the national COVID data collection across 6,000 hospitals, played critical roles in tracking and distributing COVID vaccinations, and led teams integral to the availability and distribution of millions of doses of COVID therapeutic treatments.  He first came to HHS in 2017 to launch the Health Sector Cybersecurity Coordination Center (HC3) which works to improve health sector cybersecurity.

Originally from Ohio, Mr. Singleton has two masters’ degrees from MIT for Technology Policy, and Political Science, and has a bachelor’s degree in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia.

Jennifer Strong is a journalist covering the impact of frontier technologies on the way we live and work. She’s the creator of several top science and tech podcasts for newsrooms that include ProPublica, The Wall Street Journal, and MIT Technology Review.

Her reporting has been recognized by awards juries dozens of times, including six Webby and three Ambie, or Podcast Academy Award, nominations. Her narrative podcasts were finalist selections at the New York Festivals for the last two years, and a finalist for Podcast of the Year by The Drum Awards in London for a taping she did inside an experimental fighter plane.

Strong previously led long-form audio for The Wall Street Journal where she created and hosted the first three seasons of WSJ’s The Future of Everything, and where she was also an architect of the paper’s first digital audio efforts in the mid-2000s. As a radio anchor for Dow Jones, she hosted one of the very first newsroom podcast series, WSJ’s Tech News Briefing.

Strong has also produced a business show for NPR and reported on national security topics for PRI. She’s been a keynote stage host and moderator at the United Nations General Assembly, SXSW, Web Summit, Bio, Emtech, AI for Good Global Summit, The Future of Everything Festival, and many others.