Meet AI.Health’s Newest Hire
Satish E. Viswanath, PhD will join AI.Health and Emory University in Sept 2025, as a key recruit in its journey toward empathetic and accessible AI for all. He will hold a primary faculty appointment in the Department of Pediatrics and a secondary appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Dr. Viswanath comes to Emory from Case Western Reserve University, where he is the director of the Center of Artificial Intelligence for Discovery in Disease Biology (AID2B) and Associate Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering.
He is also a research scientist and biomedical engineer at the Louis Stokes Cleveland Veterans Administration Medical Center. For the past 13 years, his work has focused on radiomics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence applied to the gastrointestinal tract and digestive diseases, which he will now bring to bear to clinical questions in the pediatric domain.
Dr. Viswanath found his passion for AI and medicine early on, being exposed to both computer science and biology thanks to his parents.
“I had this appreciation for both of these facets and somewhere along the way, I realized there was a way to actually have computers inform what might be done in biology and biomedicine,” says Dr. Viswanath.
This intersectionality sparked his curiosity to explore how to better integrate computers into medicine to improve diagnosis and treatment plans. He credits his PhD research in biomedical engineering, which integrated medical imaging and physics, as the catalyst for his current focus on AI and precision medicine. However, what drew him to gastrointestinal cancers was a different story.
Dr. Viswanath says he was most interested in understanding how patients responded after treatment was administered. Was the treatment effective in targeting and killing the malignant cells? One of the areas he found most relevant was colorectal cancer.
“Unlike many other cancers, colorectal [cancer] has a set treatment protocol, and then they're [doctors] trying to figure out which of those things they can personalize for the patient,” he states.
This especially rings true for pediatric cancers. The treatment plan for children must be personalized to account for their development and to prevent future complications.
Dr. Viswanath intends to apply his research to not only pediatric digestive cancers, but also to kidney and brain tumors, and states that Emory University is the perfect place to do this.
“What made this a very interesting idea for me was the Pediatric Research Alliance,” he says. “That's kind of unique at Emory.”
The Pediatric Research Alliance is a collaboration between Emory University, the Children's Hospital of Atlanta and other top local universities to promote research and advancement of childhood cancers. It’s this ecosystem of cooperation among a variety of researchers and specialities that drew Dr. Viswanath’s attention, but something was missing.
“One of the missing pieces of the puzzle, to me at least, was if we could bring AI to bear, then we could potentially accelerate and enhance that whole process and potentially make available more personalized options,” says Dr. Viswanath.
He believes the established cooperation of the Pediatric Research Alliance, paired with AI, could change the trajectory of cancer research and treatment plans. Luckily, AI.Health excels at that intersection.
“So, the AI.Health team was kind of the cherry on top,” says Dr. Viswanath. He says that the AI.Health community offers the chance to broaden the level of expertise and invites collaboration between a variety of AI healthcare researchers and leaders.
“AI.Health is, I would say, probably one of the premier efforts in the country in trying to build that kind of community and build that kind of ecosystem in AI,” says Dr. Viswanath.
Dr. Viswanath is looking forward to contributing his expertise to the AI.Health team. He's most excited for the potential for AI to one day be integrated into all levels of cancer research and development, from diagnosis to crafting new treatments, working with clinicians to determine its effectiveness and more.
Stay up to date with Dr. Satish Viswanath by following AI.Health!