Michael Yao is an MD-PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania leveraging AI to improve human health.
Medical student
I am an MD-PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. My research broadly focuses on trustworthy machine learning and how we can reliably use clinical ML systems under distribution shift. I am interested in how to leverage prior knowledge and statistical methods to help algorithms better generalize to new distributions, and how we can use these methods to improve rare disease diagnostics and hospital workflows. I also seek to better understand the types of distribution shift observed in clinical practice, and am also working to improve discussions on AI in medical education.
I was advised by Osbert Bastani and James Gee during my PhD, and am grateful to be supported by an NIH F30 NRSA Fellowship from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD).
self.Timeline
"""Some professional and life milestones."""
self.Changelog
"""Recent news and selected publications."""
self.Handles
"""Where to find me on the internet."""
self.Teaching
"""Mentorship and education efforts."""
self.Outreach
I designed and run a short course on the fundamentals of ML for medical students. I currently serve as a president of the Penn HealthX student group, and have previously served as Vice Chair of the Technology Committee for the American Physician Scientists Association (APSA) and as Director of Data Science and AI for MDplus. At Penn, I am involved in a number of mentorship and outreach initiatives and have served on both the Admissions Committee and AI Curriculum Steering Committee for the School of Medicine.
I am actively involved in Penn's interview and recruitment process for medical school admissions. I set aside half an hour a week to meet with current students for pro bono feedback on applications and general college advice, especially for underrepresented students from minority backgrounds. I also enjoy working with and mentoring students on interesting research projects. If you're interested in connecting, please reach out to me via email.
In my free time, I enjoy solving fun math problems and festive programming puzzles with code, and contributing to open-source software. I am also a (mediocre) chess hobbyist.