Robert Langer is one of 9 Institute Professors at MIT; being an Institute Professor is MIT’s highest honor. His articles have been cited over 460,000 times; his h-index of 332 is the highest of any engineer in history. His patents have been licensed or sublicensed to over 400 companies; he is a cofounder of many companies including Moderna. He holds 44 honorary doctorates and has received over 220 awards, including both the United States National Medals of Science and Technology & Innovation (one of 3 living individuals to have received both honors), and has been elected to the National Academies of Medicine, Engineering, Sciences, and Inventors.

Isaac “Zak” Kohane, MD, PhD, is the inaugural chair of Harvard Medical School’s Department of Biomedical Informatics, whose mission is to develop the methods, tools, and infrastructure required for a new generation of scientists and care providers to move biomedicine rapidly forward by taking advantage of the insight and precision offered by big data. Kohane develops and applies computational techniques to address disease at multiple scales, from whole health care systems to the functional genomics of neurodevelopment.

He also has worked on AI applications in medicine since the 1990’s, including automated ventilator control, pediatric growth monitoring, detection of domestic abuse, diagnosing autism from multimodal data and most recently assisting clinicians using whole genome sequence and clinical histories to diagnose rare or unknown disease patients.

His most urgent question is how to enable doctors to be most effective and enjoy their profession when they enter into a substantial symbiosis with machine intelligence. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the American College of Medical Informatics.