Shreyas Lakhtakia

About
I’m passionate about improving human health and society with data and technology, care deeply about human community, and enjoy deep conversations. Presently, I’m exploring AI for good applications as a Threshold Venture Fellow and questions of fairness and interpretability in AI as a Defense Innovation Scholar at Stanford. A third-person bio is here.

Data Scientist turned AI Product Manager
Previously, I was an AI product manager at Flatiron Health, helping create one of the world’s richest and most current datasets on how cancer is being treated in the real world to further drug development and cancer research.

I’m especially interested in how AI makes an impact in people’s lives and spent years as a data scientist building products to help improve care for at-risk patients – not just in theory, but in practice, across leading hospitals around the US. This work has since resulted in multiple patents.

Responsible AI
My interests in responsible AI stem from work I was fortunate to do with Ziad Obermeyer and Sendhil Mullainathan at a Harvard think-tank, where our work discovered, explained and addressed racial bias in AI models impacting access to healthcare for over a 100 million US patients. This work was featured in The Wall St Journal, The Washington Post, Guardian , Wired and more.

Personal
I enjoy writing about science and society and reading The Economist. I’ve lived in India, Germany and along the East Coast of the US. I’m currently based in Palo Alto, CA, where I run a small café for folks in the neighborhood. I grew up trilingual and like dogs, stationery, and oxford shirts.

Past
In past lives, I worked in management consulting at BCG, played with lasers at Princeton, where I wrote a couple of pages for a photonics textbook, and designed roller coaster rides in virtual reality in Germany.



Acknowledgements
Cole Townsend and Jaan Altosaar for creating this theme and introducing me to Jekyll respectively.