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RLI Taking the Lead Podcasts

Episode 66: Matt P. Lungren, MD, MPH




Innovating Healthcare with AI


October 25, 2024

Join host Geoffrey Rubin, MD, MBA, FACR, as he engages in an inspiring conversation with Matthew P. Lungren, MD, MPH, Chief Data Science Officer for Microsoft Health & Life Sciences. Dr. Lungren, an academic pediatric interventional radiologist with a strong interest in global healthcare, literature, and competitive swimming, discusses his transition from medicine to focusing on AI in healthcare. 

As the co-founder of the Stanford Center for AI in Medicine and Imaging, Dr. Lungren played a key role in establishing the center as a prime driver of innovation in the development and assessment of artificial intelligence and medical imaging in healthcare. 

Dr. Lungren grew up in Arizona, obtained his undergraduate degree in English and Biology from Arizona State University, and went on to earn his MPH from the University of North Carolina and his medical degree from the University of Michigan. He completed fellowships at both Cincinnati’s Children’s Hospital and Duke University. 
His defining moment came when he volunteered in Albania during a humanitarian crisis, which motivated him to pursue a career in medicine and become involved in global health initiatives and research, ultimately specializing in radiology. 

A talented and passionate educator, he has catalyzed the education of countless physicians, scientists, and laypeople, including being the top-rated instructor in the wildly successful Coursera course, Fundamentals in AI in Healthcare, completed by 25,000 students to date.
Don’t miss this special episode to learn more about Dr. Lungren’s unique career journey and his definition of a perfect Saturday afternoon—hint: it would include the latest issue of Harper’s Magazine, an Xbox, and a trip to the pool. 

Matt P. Lungren, MD, MPH

Dr. Matt Lungren is Chief Data Science Officer for Microsoft Health & Life Sciences where he focuses on translating cutting edge technology, including generative AI and cloud services, into innovative healthcare applications. As a physician and clinical machine learning researcher, he maintains collaborative research and teaching roles as adjunct professor at Stanford University.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Dr Lungren was a clinical interventional radiologist and research faculty at Stanford University Medical School where he led the Stanford Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Imaging (AIMI). He later served as Principal for Clinical AI/ML at Amazon Web Services in World Wide Public Sector Healthcare, focusing on business development for clinical machine learning technologies in the public cloud.

His scientific work has led to more than 200 publications, including work on multi-modal data fusion models for healthcare applications, new computer vision and natural language processing approaches for healthcare specific domains, opportunistic screening with machine learning for public health applications, open medical data as public good, prospective clinical trials for clinical AI translation, and application of generative AI in healthcare. He has served as advisor for early stage startups and large fortune-500 companies on healthcare AI technology development and go-to-market strategy. Dr. Lungren's work has been featured in national news outlets such as NPR, Vice News, Scientific American, and he regularly speaks at national and international scientific meetings on the topic of AI in healthcare.

Dr. Lungren is also a top rated instructor leading AI in Healthcare courses designed especially for learners with non-technical backgrounds:

Stanford/Coursera

LinkedIn Learning

Did You Know?

Outside of work, Dr. Lungren is a competitive US Masters swimmer and has been on the Stanford team since 2014, with top 10 US times in the 100 backstroke for his age group. Early mornings are spent at practice—often waking up by 4:30 with his 3 teenagers who are also competitive swimmers. They like to race with each other too - one of their traditions is that they all had to beat Dr. Lungren in a swim race to earn their first iPhone, which they all were able to do by the time they turned 13! Dr. Lungren also loves to swim with different masters clubs while traveling for work and has dropped into practices with different local teams in 30 states so far.

Dr. Lungren was a literature major in college and has subscribed and read Harper's cover to cover each month since 1999 and Granta quarterly since 2003.  His current favorite authors (though this changes often) include Cormac McCarthy, David Foster Wallace, Douglas Adams, Haruki Murakami, and Marilynne Robinson.  When Dr. Lungren gets some downtime one of his guilty pleasures is gaming (now more so with his kids too) - he plays all genres but once a year or so he'll go back and replay through some of his all-time favorites which for the past 5 or 6 years has been The Last of Us (and now part 2 as well!).

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