Senior Research Scientist • Massachusetts Institute of Technology
As clinical research director and senior research scientist at the MIT Laboratory for Computational Physiology (LCP), and as a practicing intensive care unit (ICU) physician at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), Leo brings together clinicians and data scientists to support research using data routinely collected in the process of care. His group built and maintains the publicly-available Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC) database and the Philips-MIT eICU Collaborative Research Database, with more than 20,000 users from around the world. In addition, Leo is one of the course directors for global health informatics to improve quality of care and collaborative data science in medicine, both at MIT. He is an editor of the textbook for each course, both released under an open access license. “Secondary Analysis of Electronic Health Records” has been downloaded more than a million times, and has been translated to Mandarin, Spanish, Korean and Portuguese. Leo has spoken in more than 35 countries across 6 continents about the value of data and learning in health systems.
Leo has practiced medicine in three continents, giving him broad perspectives in health care delivery. He founded and co-directs Sana, a cross-disciplinary organization based at the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science at MIT, whose objective is to leverage information technology to improve health outcomes in low- and middle-income countries. At its core is an open-source mobile tele-health platform that allows for capture, transmission and archiving of complex medical data (e.g. images, videos, physiologic signals such as ECG, EEG and oto-acoustic emission responses), in addition to patient demographic and clinical information. Sana is the inaugural recipient of both the mHealth (Mobile Health) Alliance Award from the United Nations Foundation and the Wireless Innovation Award from the Vodafone Foundation in 2010. The software has since been implemented around the globe including India, Kenya, Lebanon, Haiti, Mongolia, Uganda, Brazil, Ethiopia, Argentina, and South Africa.