Harvard Medical School Media Immersion: Thursday, May 30, Boston

Application Deadline: March 31

Harvard Medical School will host a daylong educational immersion for science reporters on Thursday, May 30, on the Harvard Medical School campus in Boston.

The Opportunity

Seating is limited. Harvard Medical School will cover the cost of meals and ground transportation for up to 20 journalists, plus hotel accommodations for out-of-town travelers.

Please note that attendees are responsible for their own travel to and from the Boston area.

This is an educational opportunity offered on a background basis.

The Theme

Artificial Intelligence Beyond the Clinic

Artificial intelligence is poised to reshape the practice of medicine, but its impact on other scientific fields could be even more profound

That AI will transform the way clinicians diagnose disease, individualize treatments, and forecast patients’ long-term disease risk is no longer a question. AI is already disrupting health care in myriad ways.

But the excitement surrounding medical AI has eclipsed the promise of artificial intelligence beyond the clinic.

Artificial intelligence can change the way scientists discover and design drugs; it can inform the design of synthetic organisms for medical and industrial applications; it can explain how proteins fold and how viruses shapeshift to evade immune defenses; it can illuminate how cancer manipulates the immune system to ensure its survival; and it can reveal how various molecules interact in states of equilibrium and disequilibrium. AI is doing all that with never-before-seen speed and accuracy.

These are some of the emerging uses of AI in the natural and life sciences that will transform knowledge and discovery beyond the bedside.

A daylong media boot camp at Harvard Medical School will explore these areas more.

Topics include:

• How AI can augment the human scientist.
• AI in protein discovery and protein design.
• Illuminating interactions across molecules and proteins to understand how the body works and what goes wrong in disease.
• AI and the exposome: Can AI help researchers untangle the interplay between genes, environment, social determinants of health, and more?
• How AI can elucidate perturbational effects in complex systems to forecast disease risk and design therapies.
• Predicting pathogen evolution and forecasting disease outbreaks.
• Applying an AI lens to the study of cancer evolution, tumor microenvironment, and tumor behavior.
• AI-augmented laboratories of the future.
• AI and the brain: Demystifying decision-making.
• Bioethical and biosecurity concerns of AI tools in science.

To Apply

Please email the following materials to [email protected] by 11:59 p.m., ET, on Sunday, March 31.

• Two to three paragraphs detailing why you are interested in the topic, and what you hope to take away from the seminar.
• Three to five relevant samples of your work in the field of science/medical journalism.
• A brief bio sketch (around 250 words).

In addition, please state that you have approval from your editor, or usual freelance clients, to cover the topic broadly at some point in the future. Reporters are not obligated to cover Harvard Medical School’s work in the area, just the subject as a whole.

Selected participants will be notified by April 15.