Tom Pollard

Tom Pollard is a Research Scientist at the MIT Laboratory for Computational Physiology, where he works at the intersection of medicine and engineering to improve how clinical data is shared and reused for the benefit of patients. He is also Technical Director of PhysioNet, the widely used repository of freely available physiological and clinical data, and an Instructor in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He completed an interdisciplinary PhD on computational modeling of patient physiology at University College London, working across the Mullard Space Science Laboratory and University College Hospital, before joining MIT in 2015.

His work centers on the development of databases and software that make machine learning in health possible, with a particular focus on critical care data. He co-developed the MIMIC critical care databases (including MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV), openly accessible electronic health record datasets derived from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center that are used by thousands of researchers worldwide for clinical research and education. He is a strong advocate for open science, reproducibility, and responsible data sharing.

Pollard is a Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute and an instructor for The Carpentries. He serves on the editorial boards of PLOS Digital Health and npj Scientific Data, has been a member of MIT's Task Force on Open Access, and is an organizer and committee member for the Conference on Health, Inference, and Learning (CHIL).

At the camp: AM Lecturer — 9:00 AM Lecture - Overview of data availability across domains.