The top 10 people in artificial-intelligence healthcare

Aggarwal founded Wysa, a cognitive-behavioral-therapy AI chatbot that 6 million people in 95 countries use. Aggarwal said in a 2022 Medium interview that her father, who rose from humble circumstances to head the Indian postal system, inspired her. He asked her and her sister to help bring three people out of poverty in India once they were financially able. Her sister now works in diabetes care, and Aggarwal turned to mental health by founding Wysa. Wysa received an AI Award from the UK’s National Health Service, and the FDA granted Wysa breakthrough-device status.

Elhadad is an associate professor and the department chair of biomedical informatics at Columbia University. In women’s health, she created machine-learning models that analyze patient self-tracking data. Elhadad has also built models that ingest and summarize electronic health-record data to reduce the documentation burden on clinicians. She’s also the leader of Even, a Columbia interdisciplinary research initiative focused on data-powered women’s health.

Ferrucci’s name is synonymous with AI. A renowned machine-learning researcher, he invented IBM’s Watson, a Q-and-A computer system that debuted in 2010 and famously won Jeopardy in 2011. Now Ferrucci brings his 25-plus-year career as an AI researcher to his startup, Elemental Cognition, which is building machine learning that “thinks before it talks.” Aiming to increase trust from human users, the startup raised $60 million in funding earlier this year.

Fortney spent years studying aging and the genomes of centenarians before launching her startup, BioAge Labs, in 2015. The company uses AI to find drugs and therapies that treat age-related illnesses. Rather than a single drug for one disease, she’s targeting the molecular mechanisms of aging. She said BioAge Labs has multiple programs in human testing including a therapy helping older people preserve healthy muscle mass and an immune-aging drug. Fortney has raised about $130 million from investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Elad Gil, and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals.

The AI boom is supercharging drug discovery and development. Frey is one of the entrepreneurs leading the charge. In 2015, he founded Deep Genomics, which uses machine learning to create new genetic-disease therapies. SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Khosla Ventures back the startup. Nearly 30 years ago, Frey invented one of the first deep-learning algorithms and has since authored and coauthored more than 200 papers on machine learning and genome biology.

Kohli leads the science program at Google DeepMind, which uses AI in multiple areas from genomics to quantum chemistry. He also leads research on ensuring the safety of AI systems such as SynthID, a tool for watermarking and identifying AI-generated images. Kohli’s DeepMind team is responsible for AlphaFold, which predicts protein structures. His team is also working on AI for quantum physics and nuclear fusion. Kohli previously spent 10 years at Microsoft, serving as the director of research for Microsoft’s Cognition group.

Koller, one of the leading AI-healthcare experts, inspired a generation of AI technologists. Her company, Insitro, generates large, high-quality medical datasets for machine-learning applications in the cell-biology and bioengineering fields. She cofounded Coursera, a pioneer in online education, and was the chief computing officer of Calico, a stealthy Alphabet unit focused on longevity.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death, and Min has devoted his career to helping people improve their heart health. In 2019, he founded Cleerly Health, a digital-health startup using AI to provide precision heart healthcare. Prior to Cleerly Health, Min spent nearly 15 years as a practicing cardiologist and completed a stint as the director of the Dalio Institute of Cardiovascular Imaging, a program focused on improving treatments for cardiovascular diseases.

Novorol has a long history in healthcare. A trained doctor, she earned her medical degree from the University of Bristol and spent nearly a decade practicing medicine before going back to school and completing a Ph.D. in developmental neurobiology at Cambridge. In 2012, she cofounded Ada Health, a startup that uses AI to help patients understand their symptoms and receive care. The company raised $120 million in a 2022 funding round from Farallon Capital, Red River West, and Bertelsmann Investments.

What if computers could smell? Wiltschko works to answer that question. For the last year, he’s been building Osmo, an AI startup digitizing smell the way computers have already digitized visuals and sound. Wiltschko’s ultimate goal is to improve human wellness through smell — such as designing molecules that smell bad to mosquitoes and are more effective than traditional bug spray. Prior to Osmo, Wiltschko cut his teeth as a research scientist at Google Brain. Before that, he founded two AI startups. He earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard in 2016.