Frida Polli, a neuroscientist, entrepreneur, investor, and inventor identified for her modern contributions on the crossroads of behavioral science and synthetic intelligence, is MIT’s new visiting innovation scholar for the 2024-25 tutorial 12 months. She is the primary visiting innovation scholar to be housed inside the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.
Polli started her profession in tutorial neuroscience with a concentrate on multimodal mind imaging associated to well being and illness. She was a fellow on the Psychiatric Neuroimaging Group at Mass General Brigham and Harvard Medical School. She then joined the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT as a postdoc, the place she labored with John Gabrieli, the Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and a professor of mind and cognitive sciences.
Her analysis has gained many awards, together with a Young Investigator Award from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation. She authored over 30 peer-reviewed articles, with notable publications within the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Neuroscience, and Brain. She transitioned from academia to entrepreneurship by finishing her MBA on the Harvard Business School (HBS) as a Robert Kaplan Life Science Fellow. During this time, she additionally gained the Life Sciences Track and the Audience Choice Award within the 2010 MIT $100K Entrepreneurship competitors as a member of Aukera Therapeutics.
After HBS, Polli launched pymetrics, which harnessed developments in cognitive science and machine studying to develop analytics-driven decision-making and efficiency enhancement software program for the human capital sector. She holds a number of patents for the expertise developed at pymetrics, which she co-founded in 2012 and led as CEO till her profitable exit in 2022. Pymetrics was a World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneer and Global Innovator, an Inc. 5000’s Fastest-Growing firm, and Forbes Artificial Intelligence 50 firm. Polli and pymetrics additionally performed a pivotal function in passing the first-in-the-nation algorithmic bias regulation — New York’s Automated Employment Decision Tool regulation — which went into impact in July 2023.
Making her return to MIT as a visiting innovation scholar, Polli is collaborating carefully with Sendhil Mullainathan, the Peter de Florez Professor within the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Economics, and a principal investigator within the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. With Mullainathan, she is working to carry collectively a broad array of college, college students, and postdocs throughout MIT to deal with concrete issues the place people and algorithms intersect, to develop a brand new subdomain of pc science particular to behavioral science, and to coach the next era of scientists to be bilingual in these two fields.
“Sometimes you get lucky, and sometimes you get unreasonably lucky. Frida has thrived in each of the facets we’re looking to have impact in — academia, civil society, and the marketplace. She combines a startup mentality with an abiding interest in positive social impact, while capable of ensuring the kind of intellectual rigor MIT demands. It’s an exceptionally rare combination, one we are unreasonably lucky to have,” says Mullainathan.
“People are increasingly interacting with algorithms, often with poor results, because most algorithms are not built with human interplay in mind,” says Polli. “We will focus on designing algorithms that will work synergistically with people. Only such algorithms can help us address large societal challenges in education, health care, poverty, et cetera.”
Polli was acknowledged as one in every of Inc.’s Top 100 Female Founders in 2019, adopted by being named to Entrepreneur’s Top 100 Powerful Women in 2020, and to the 2024 listing of 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics. Her work has been highlighted by main shops together with The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The Economist, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Bloomberg, and Inc.
Beyond her function at pymetrics, she based Alethia AI in 2023, a corporation centered on selling transparency in expertise, and in 2024, she launched Rosalind Ventures, devoted to investing in girls founders in science and well being care. She can be an advisor on the Buck Institute’s Center for Healthy Aging in Women.
“I’m delighted to welcome Dr. Polli again to MIT. As a bilingual skilled in each behavioral science and AI, she is a pure match for the school. Her entrepreneurial background makes her a terrific inaugural visiting innovation scholar,” says Dan Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the Henry Ellis Warren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.