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.