Harvard Medical School Alums Donate $6 Million for AI Health Care Education

Updated November 21, 2024, at 11:49 a.m.

The Dunleavy Foundation, led by Harvard Medical School alums Keith R. Dunleavy and Katherine K. Dunleavy, gave HMS $6 million to expand educational opportunities for leveraging artificial intelligence in health care, the school announced last week.

The Dunleavy Fund for Clinical AI — composed of a $1 million grant and a $5 million endowed gift — will back clinical AI initiatives for graduate and undergraduate students and postdoctoral researchers.

One of the fund’s primary goals is to expand the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Ph.D. Track, which HMS began offering in September as part of a broader shift to help students adapt to the changing medical landscape.

“To remain at the forefront of medical education, HMS must anticipate the physician of the future, practicing in an environment rich with cognitive support resources powered by artificial intelligence tools,” HMS Dean George Q. Daley ’82 told HMS News, which is run by the school.

Keith Dunleavy, who founded the health care analytics company Inovalon, told HMS News that the fund will allow students to couple technology with an understanding of health care at large.

“We are hopeful that by supporting training that brings these fields together, we can help in some small way to bring the power of AI to the great needs of medicine and health care,” Dunleavy said.

According to Lucia R. Morris — a first year Ph.D. student in the AI in Medicine track — the program “combines a rigorous technical training with hands-on experience in medical context,” including clinical rotations.

Morris said the opportunity for students to work in clinical settings allows them to apply their knowledge about the power of AI in medicine.

“It means that we can actually try to implement some of the tools that we build and iterate on them — instead of just making super cutting-edge models that sit, you know, in the GitHub repo,” Morris said.

The Dunleavy Fund will also back pipeline programs — spearheaded by the Department of Biomedical Informatics — that will enable younger researchers to interact with clinical AI.

One program will be a hackathon where undergraduate students can use clinical data to probe topics of interest and devise innovative solutions. Another will establish research internships and publication mentorship for undergraduate and master’s students through the Department of Biomedical Informatics.

“The time to invest in building a pipeline of AI experts for health care is now,” Daley said.

—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at veronica.paulus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VeronicaHPaulus.

—Staff writer Akshaya Ravi can be reached at akshaya.ravi@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @akshayaravi22.