Hossein Estiri, PhD, is building medicine's new discovery engine. As Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Clinical Augmented Intelligence (CLAI) Group at Massachusetts General Hospital, he leads one of medicine's frontier labs for agentic AI, developing autonomous systems that transform the messy reality of electronic health records into precision tools for finding cures. His lab has pioneered methods that extract therapeutic insights from clinical data at a scale no trial could match -- work that has reshaped how we understand Long COVID and other complex phenotypes, where patients have waited too long for answers. He believes the next generation of treatments won't come from bigger trials, but from smarter questions asked of the data we already have.
Maria Gabriela Almeida received her undergraduate education in Chemistry at Universidade de Lisboa and the Master's degree in Biotechnology from Universidade Técnica de Lisboa. She completed her Doctoral studies in Biochemistry (2003), at Universidade Nova de Lisboa.
She is an Associate Professor at the Egas Moniz School of Health and Science and a researcher at CiiEM and UCIBIO-i4HB. Her research focuses on the development of point-of-use electrochemical biosensors for clinical diagnostics (IVD) and water monitoring, with particular emphasis on nitrite sensing. She has authored more than 55 scientific papers and book chapters and is the inventor of two patents. Since 2018, she has served as an external evaluator for the Horizon and EIC programmes and as an editorial board member of Scientific Reports and Frontiers in Sensors. Dr. Almeida is also the CEO and co-founder of Nitrogen Sensing Solutions (NS2), a deep-tech start-up dedicated to the sustainable management of nutrients in aquatic ecosystems. Her innovation and leadership have been recognised through a WomenTechEU 2023 (EIC) grant, inclusion in the Global 500 Female Founders of Ocean & New Energy 2024, participation in the CEO Champions Board of the World Bank Youth Innovation Challenge Water Solutions for a New Climate Reality 2024, and her selection to the Women Leadership Program 2025.
