Monica Bertagnolli - Episode 83

In this episode, part of a special collaboration between ACM ByteCast and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)’s For Your Informatics podcast, Sabrina Hsueh and Li Zhou host Monica Bertagnolli, a surgical oncologist, physician-scientist, and President Elect of the National Academy of Medicine—the first woman to hold that position in NAM’s history. She previously served as the 17th Director of the National Institutes of Health and the 16th Director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), as well as President of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. In the past, she was the Richard E. Wilson Professor of Surgery in surgical oncology at Harvard Medical School, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and a member of the Gastrointestinal Cancer Treatment and Sarcoma Centers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

In the interview, Dr. Bertagnolli shares her unique journey from Princeton engineering to cancer surgery and national leadership. She emphasizes collaboration, system thinking, and bringing an engineering mindset of “pilot, test, scale, and continuously improve” to AI in healthcare. She highlights her role in founding mCODE, an initiative to improve patient care through oncological data interoperability, and how NAM's six core commitments and ten guiding principles for responsible AI address issues of bias and equity. Dr. Bertagnolli also offers insights on the growing erosion of trust in science and medicine—and how to restore it.