Andrew Beam, PhD

Andrew Beam is an assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, with secondary appointments in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and the Department of Newborn Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. His research develops and applies machine-learning methods to extract meaningful insights from clinical and biological datasets, and he is the recipient of a Pioneer Award from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for his work on medical artificial intelligence.

Previously he was a Senior Fellow at Flagship Pioneering and the founding head of machine learning at Generate Biosciences, Inc., a Flagship-backed venture that seeks to use machine learning to improve our ability to engineer proteins.

He earned his PhD in 2014 from N.C. State University for work on Bayesian neural networks, and he holds degrees in computer science (BS), computer engineering (BS), electrical engineering (BS), and statistics (MS), also from N.C. State. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and then served as a junior faculty member.

Beam’s group is principally concerned with improving, stream-lining, and automating decision-making in healthcare through the use of quantitative, data-driven methods. He does this through rigorous methodological research coupled with deep partnerships with physicians and other members of the healthcare workforce. As part of this vision, he works to see these ideas translated into decision-making tools that doctors can use to better care for their patients.