17 Mar Faculty Q&A: Ben Lengerich on the power of AI in medicine
AI is reshaping medicine, helping researchers and practitioners make better predictions, understand diseases in new ways, and personalize treatments. For instance, Google’s DeepMind won the 2024 Nobel Prize for creating AlphaFold, an AI system that advanced biomedical research and drug discovery by accurately predicting 3D protein structures from amino acid sequences, a previously slow and labor-intensive process.
Ben Lengerich, an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at UW–Madison, is on the forefront of this field, exploring and advancing the power of AI to predict and explain health outcomes. His work bridges the gap between data-driven insights and medical interventions by building models designed to be transparent for doctors and researchers and to account for the specific health context of each patient. Lengerich is one of many faculty members across the School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences (CDIS) studying ways to harness AI for the public good; for instance, researchers in Computer Sciences and the Information School (iSchool) are examining how to improve the safety and security of AI technologies. Read more…