This year’s Conference is entitled “Precision Medicine & Society: New Perspectives,” and will present the work of emerging scholars in this fast-growing field. The Precision Medicine & Society Program is an integral part of Columbia’s Precision Medicine Initiative. This University-wide collaboration was created to jump-start academic discussion and research about the interplay between the biomedical advances of precision medicine and the social sciences, humanities, law, and business. It brings together biomedical and public health researchers, clinicians, and bioethicists working at our Medical Center with social scientists, legal scholars, and humanists in the Faculty of Arts & Sciences and the Law and Business Schools.

Most of the presenters at our previous conferences have been seasoned scholars or practitioners. This year, the conference will showcase the next generation of scholars working on Precision Medicine & Society issues. For this purpose, we have organized two thematic sessions, each bringing together one senior scholar with three younger, emerging scholars working on a related set of problems. We hope that the ensuing discussion will bring broader recognition to the work of the younger participants, while also linking them to an inspiring model represented by the senior scholar.

The two themes were selected to capture exciting cutting-edge research that is being conducted by emerging scholars and that is pertinent to the key concerns of Precision Medicine & Society. One set of issues relates to the promise of Machine Learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to provide more precise predictive models capable of improving, individualizing and perhaps even equalizing medical diagnosis, treatment and care. Another set of issues relates to the ethical questions raised by genomics research, from the inclusion of underserved populations among research cohorts, to the problems encountered when extending precision medicine methods to the fields of psychiatry and socio-genomics.

SCHEDULE:

10:45a: Introduction by Gil Eyal and Paul Appelbaum

11:00a - 12:45p: The Contribution of Machine Learning and Predictive Analytics to Precision Medicine

Moderated by Bhaven Sampat and Ashley Swanson 

Session Speakers:
Stephen Coussens, Columbia University
Emma Pierson, Microsoft Research, Cornell Tech    
Ziad Obermeyer, University of California Berkeley 
Dan Zeltzer, Tel Aviv University

12:45 - 1:15p   Lunch break

1:15 - 3:00p: Empirical Studies of  Ethical Issues Raised by Genomics Research

Moderated by Sandra Soo-Jin Lee

Session Speakers:
Anna Jabloner, Harvard University
Daphne Martschenko, Stanford University
Jenny Reardon, University of California Santa Cruz 
Krystal Tsosie, Vanderbilt University