Faculty Expert Profile

Suchi Saria is a professor of computer science at the Whiting School of Engineering and of statistics and health policy at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. She also directs the Machine Learning and Healthcare Lab and is the founding research director of the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare.

Saria uses sophisticated computer science and health data to help save lives by individualizing patient care. Her pioneering work centers on enabling new classes of diagnostic and treatment planning tools for health care—tools that use statistical machine-learning techniques to tease out subtle information from "messy" observational datasets, and that provide reliable inferences for individualizing care decisions.

Algorithms she created are being used today in hospitals to predict with great accuracy which patients will succumb to deadly sepsis (a condition that annually kills more people than breast and prostate cancer combined). That work led to her being named one of Popular Science magazine's "Brilliant 10" in 2016, one of MIT's "35 Innovators Under 35" in 2017, and a member of the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leaders in 2018.

Saria and her team also created an app that allows patients with Parkinson's disease to track their symptoms on their personal smartphones.