Day In The Life Of An AWS Professional Services Senior Global Advisory HealthCare & Life-Sciences, AI/ML

1. Title/Professional Service team: (AI/ML Sub-practice Lead) Sr. Global Advisory, HealthCare & Life-Sciences, AI/ML/Professional Services HCLS Industry Specialist Practice.

2. Tell us about yourself. From a young age I was always very excited about the power of Science, Engineering and Mathematics to transform humanity into the world of ‘Star Trek.’ Based on this inner belief, I devoted myself to science – especially the merging of Biology and Physics using mathematical modeling. This fascination led me to major in Biophysics at the University of California at Berkeley (Cal). After earning my Biophysics bachelor – I spent some time working in industry and joined the PhD program at Texas A&M. This was followed with a post-doctoral fellowship at the Neuroscience Institute under the mentorship of Dr. Gerald Edelman, the Nobel Laureate in Medicine. One of the topics I pursued was how ‘dumb’ neurons can form our thinking and conscious brain – I studied the fascinating topic of how neurons are cued into morphological structures giving rise to topo-biological complexity by mathematical modeling – especially modeling of genetic markers that enable the structure function relationships.

I also was fortunate enough to help form a venture backed Biotech company to pursue AI designing of gene therapeutics with micro- and silencer- RNAs in Oncology – winning several grant awards from National institute of health, the Army and the DoD. I led the global GE Healthcare Data Science effort in Bioprocess analytics and Precision medicine, and a groundbreaking ML partnership with Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Immune Oncology. I live in the Bay Area with my family, I am fortunate to have sons who also joined Cal Berkeley – now attending Haas school of Business.

3. Tell us about your role: At AWS I lead the Global HealthCare and Life Science Specialty practice in AI and Machine Learning. Every day I help patients get best healthcare possible powered by the best AWS Machine Learning tools and services. My team is composed of several highly capable Data Scientists and ML specialists that have earned PhDs from some of the most prestigious Universities around the globe. Together our team represents several tens of years of experience with deep subject matter expertise.?We specialize in helping customers develop AI and Machine Learning capabilities across the value chain – from Research and Development of new drugs candidates to cohort identification in clinical trial design, as well as, providing for patient and healthcare provider insights.

4. What is your typical day- Morning/noon/afternoon (Special activities, responsibilities, fun facts)??

My day start early in the morning. The first 2-3 hours are spent in virtual meetings with customers and teams. After that I catchup on emails and correspondence. On a typical day I also lead complimentary workshops with customers – where I use the AWS Professional Services ‘working backwards’ session to identify high-value business use-cases with the customer business and IT teams. Meetings with team members and customers take place in the afternoon. Late in the afternoon, I often have working sessions with team members either one-on-one or in small working virtual teams – these are centered around document readings and writing. Later in the evening I work on my own documents writing, such as ideation and design documents as well as, reading literature and AWS internal trainings.

5. What do you like most about working for AWS? Did you have any inspiring moments?

As part of AWS Professional Services team, my every day is exciting. I am constantly inspired by new tools and capabilities that enable our customers (Pharma companies) in providing for their patient and healthcare providers. Using cloud capabilities powered by AI and Machine Learning – our customers are finding better medicines, mRNA and gene/cell therapies that are saving lives. Customers come to us with unique problems – sometimes they think that their problems are unique to them – but because of our deep expertise across the industry – often we surprise them and show them industry best practices and how AI and ML can solve for them. Sometimes we build with our customers’ scientists – other times we only provide guidance to their builder teams to move forward, but each time we the solution is iteratively better in scope and scale.

6. What is your favorite leadership principle?and why??

My favorite leadership principle is ‘customer obsession.’ As ?Professional Services. HealthCare and Life Science specialist my ultimate customer is the patient – delivered via Pharma companies, hospitals and providers. Every day I think of the deep impact of healthcare on patient lives. From cradle to grave, healthcare touches us most prominently – yet it is least understood and the most complicated and expensive. All of us have been or will be patients at some time in our life. I firmly believe that AI and Machine Learning using the cloud will lead to more lives saved, with controlled expenses and better-quality healthcare for all patients.