van der Schaar Lab

The van der Schaar Lab congratulates Ahmed Alaa on his appointment as Assistant Professor

The van der Schaar Lab is delighted to announce that lab alumnus Ahmed Alaa is appointed as one of the inaugural Assistant Professors in the new computational precision health program at UC Berkeley and UCSF.

Ahmed did his PhD at the lab from 2015 to 2019, as student of the University of California, Los Angeles, under the supervision of Mihaela van der Schaar. His PhD research has focused on clinical decision making and his dissertation, entitled “Discovering Data-Driven Actionable Intelligence for Clinical Decision Support,” is available here.

Subsequently, Ahmed remained with the lab as a postdoctoral scholar at UCLA and an affiliated postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge (COVID-19 task force). His primary research focus has been on individualised treatment effect inference, automated machine learning (AutoML), uncertainty quantification and time-series analysis.

In 2021, Ahmed received the Edward K. Rice Outstanding Doctoral Student Award from UCLA. The award is administered by the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering on an annual basis and honours the achievements of a single alumnus (chosen from among all the school’s departments) who has demonstrated academic and research excellence, leadership, and service to the school, university, or community.

After leaving the lab, he joined the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, MIT CSAIL, and IMES department as a postdoctoral associate. There, he worked on building computer vision models for cardiac imaging and ML models for predicting individual response to therapy based on different medical imaging modalities.

Where are you going next?

“This summer, I am joining UC Berkeley and UCSF as one of the inaugural Assistant Professors in the new computational precision health program, with courtesy affiliations in the EECS and Statistics departments. I will help set up the new program and participate in designing its curriculum as well as build my own research lab.”

What research topic are you especially passionate about?

“I am especially passionate about designing multi-modal deep learning models that can jointly process free-text clinical notes along with medical imaging data as well as other data modalities such as time-series (e.g., ECGs). I envision these models being used within decision support systems that can guide clinicians towards diagnosing challenging cases by navigating different clinical conditions across different data modalities.”

Looking back, how did your time at the Lab influence you?

“I appreciated the exposure to real world clinical problems during my time at the lab and I think my experience collaborating and communicating interdisciplinary research problems with clinical collaborators during my PhD has set me up for my independent academic career.”

“My experience collaborating and communicating interdisciplinary research problems with clinical collaborators during my PhD has set me up for my independent academic career.”

Ahmed Alaa

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Mihaela van der Schaar and the lab’s researchers would like to wholeheartedly congratulate Ahmed on his appointment as Assistant Professor, and wish him the very best of luck in his new role with UC Berkeley and UCSF. It is encouraging to see where the careers of our graduates lead to.

As one of the dominant forces driving progress in a burgeoning area, the van der Schaar Lab continues to grow its research team.

To see a full list of our current research team members, click here. To inquire about PhD studentships, visit this page.

Andreas Bedorf