Coworking with Alexander Kerman

Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Emerging Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?

I make healthcare data more accessible and more private by spreading the use of a new technology: synthetic data.

Synthetic data is realistic but not real, meaning it contains all of the insight of real data without containing a single real person’s information. Syntegra creates synthetic data using generative AI to make healthcare innovation easier, faster, and—crucially—safer.

What’s your favorite emerging tech project you’ve worked on?

Syntegra’s synthetic-data approach, far and away. I’ve never been involved in something that could help so many people in so many ways.

Second place: Launching a digital pathology startup to build infrastructure for diagnostic innovation. Like Syntegra, the goal here was to unleash data for AI/ML-driven innovation.

Third: a research project on a clinical decision support tool (basically helping doctors make better treatment decisions), which showed how these tools can double appropriate treatment choices.

What emerging tech are you most optimistic about? Least? And why?

Most? Synthetic data. For AI to get out of the lab and into production, you need model training to be easy, but data is expensive (and, in healthcare, inaccessible). Some synthetic-data startups have already shown the impact in other spaces, but the potential in healthcare is enormous.

Least? Computational biology. Computational biology is the concept of simulating biological processes—basically, re-creating life on a chip. While there are some areas where this will work in the short term—especially around simpler things like protein-folding—I’m pretty suspicious that we’re anywhere close to modeling more complex biological processes with enough detail to find new drugs. There’s just way too much going on, and the unknown unknowns are mind-boggling—but if I’m wrong, the potential impact is equally mind-boggling.

What’s the best piece of tech-related media you’ve read/watched/listened to?

The Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingos changed the course of my life. A friend of mine who is a product manager at Microsoft gave it to me during med school, right when I was starting to realize I didn’t love clinical medicine. The clear explanations made the beautiful simplicity of machine learning so alluring that I knew I had to find a way to combine ML and healthcare in my career—which I eventually did after a pit stop in consulting.