Please join us in welcoming Monica Agrawal, PhD, to Duke AI Health! Dr. Agrawal, who has a joint appointment through the Duke School of Medicine’s Duke Department of Biostatistics & Bioinformatics and the Department of Computer Science, will also be joining Duke AI Health as a Faculty Affiliate, where she will work on AI applications that facilitate clinical decision support and improve accessibility for patients.

“We’re tremendously excited to welcome Monica to Duke,” said David Page, PhD, chair of the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics. “Not only does she bring an outstanding academic track record, but also a wealth of real-world experience that’s directly relevant to some of the most pressing problems we’re working to solve in the world of health AI.”

With an academic background in computer science that includes an undergraduate degree from Stanford and a doctorate from MIT, Dr. Agrawal began working at the intersection of the digital and healthcare worlds at an early point in her career, starting with an internship at Flatiron Health. It was during this initial experience that she began to appreciate the gap between the possibilities offered by new algorithmic technologies and the actual implementation of those tools in healthcare.

“Natural language is embedded everywhere in healthcare: from clinical notes to trial criteria to patient communication. There is a lot of room for technologies like large language models to improve workflows, in conjunction with thoughtful and careful data science,” notes Agrawal.

Following her experience at Flatiron, Agrawal entered a PhD program at MIT, where she focused on machine learning approaches that used natural language processing to extract useful information from electronic health records, leveraging the text contained in those records for downstream uses in research and patient care. After receiving her doctorate in 2023 and co-founding a health AI company, Agrawal joined Duke the following year.

“It was really important to me to be at a school with strengths in both medicine and computer science,” says Agrawal, who emphasized the importance of an academic culture that supports interdisciplinary approaches to research. “That interdisciplinary culture is key to translation and going the last mile.” She also notes that that Duke’s robust track record in implementation and governance of AI were also contributing factors in her choice.

Agrawal is now working on projects that include incorporating AI-powered clinical decision support in EHRs while still allowing physicians to exercise agency and judgment in making clinical decisions, as well as balancing the benefits of automation with the imperative to ensure patient safety. In her spare time, she is also getting up to speed as newly minted fan of Blue Devils basketball, which notes that she has been watching “passionately” since her decision to join the Duke family.

“We feel very fortunate to have a talent like Monica joining our team at Duke,” says Duke Health Chief Data Scientist and AI Health Director Michael Pencina, PhD. “She has deep knowledge and experience in fields that are right now on the cutting edge of applications in health AI, and we expect her to contribute significantly to our efforts to advance the state of the art in effective, trustworthy AI for healthcare.”