Harvard Kennedy School Public Impact Analytics Science Lab Receives $3 Million From DOD

The Public Impact Analytics Science Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School received a nearly $3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense on Sept. 1 for a project that will leverage artificial intelligence to create personalized treatments for melanoma.

The initiative — a collaboration between PIAS and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute — will use AI to analyze genomic data that will identify how best to implement treatments that use patients’ immune systems to detect and eradicate melanoma and other forms of cancer.

HKS professor Soroush Saghafian — the co-principal investigator on the project — said he was excited to receive the grant and design “superior tools that can actually impact what we give to patients of cancer.”

“These are treatments that are fully personalized to each patient using genomic data, and provide the sort of solutions that the doctors might not be able to figure out or to come up with,” he said.

Saghfian added that the project will also build a chatbot system for physicians to be able to question the AI system’s recommendations, since he believes trust in AI among medical professionals is still low.

The technology-intensive project launches as Kennedy School Dean Jeremy M. Weinstein — who told HKS alumni in June that he hoped to expand the Kennedy School’s focus on technology — eases into his first term at the school’s top post.

While the project’s healthcare focus is unusual for HKS, Saghafian said the Kennedy School became involved with the initiative because it could provide intimate knowledge of medicine to policymakers hoping to craft better-informed healthcare policy.

“This intersection of public policy and essentially operations is what brought me to HKS,” Saghafian said. “If you don’t know how hospitals run and you just design policies, then the policies are not going to have an impact, right?”

PIAS has previously partnered with several governments on data-oriented public policy projects, including the government of Bahrain in 2020 to design a more effective strategy for mitigating the spread of Covid-19 in the country.

Saghafian, who joined the Kennedy School in 2015, is one of the school’s few professors focused on data, machine learning, and technology — topics he said he hopes the school continues to focus on.

“I do think we need more courses on these areas — on AI, on machine learning, on essentially problem solving using advanced analytics and newer tools,” Saghafian said. “The curriculum needs to reflect the changes that we are seeing now, and the availability of, again, both data and this amount of tools.”

He added that his work at PIAS led him to propose a Ph.D. program in data analytics for students at the Kennedy School — and he expressed hope that Weinstein will throw his support behind the program.

“Hopefully with the new dean and things like that, it’s going to move forward,” he said.

—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.

—Staff writer Dhruv T. Patel can be reached at dhruv.patel@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @dhruvtkpatel.