Pratik Shah is the principal investigator leading the Health 0.0 research lab at MIT that improves human health by augmenting biomedical research by novel applications of engineering, medical imaging, molecular biology and deep learning for diagnosing and treating cancer and infectious diseases.
His work builds an unified scaffolding of novel deep learning, biological and statistical reasoning methods to resolve distinct hypothesis driven research problems including, for example, how to diagnose and treat cancer disease, how to leverage causal structures in big observational data for unbiased patient centered medicine, and how infectious microbes and host cells adapt during disease – under a single theoretical and methodological framework. Dr. Shah also has significant expertise and motivation for real-world clinical evaluations of research findings for a long-term vision to establish a new theory and practice for computational medicine research, and moving the field forward from static snapshot to a fully dynamic and living-systems wide perspective of molecular and clinical processes that can improve health and manage diseases. Key research goals are: 1) Novel medical technologies for translational clinical and biomedical research and real-world benefit for patients and providers; 2) Augmenting artificial intelligence , machine learning , medical imaging and neural network capabilities for personalized digital medicines; and 3) Empowering patients, physicians, researchers, and regulators for making fair and equitable healthcare decisions. Recent work led by Dr. Shah has been published in Cell Reports Methods, Nature Digital Medicine, Cell press, Journal of American Medical Association, IEEE conferences, and Proceedings of National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine workshops.
Dr. Shah serves on the grant reviewer board of the Center for Scientific Review and National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health and foundations supporting patient-centric research. Past acknowledgments include the American Society for Microbiology’s Raymond W. Sarber National Award, a Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospitals ECOR Fund for Medical Discovery postdoctoral fellowship, andcoverage by leading national and international news media outlets. Dr. Shah has been an invited discussion leader at Gordon Research Seminars; a speaker at American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, Gordon Research Conferences, The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, TED and IEEE bioengineering conferences; and a peer reviewer for leading scientific publications. Dr. Shah has BS, MS, and PhD degrees in biological sciences and completed fellowship training at Massachusetts General Hospital, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and Harvard Medical School.