Ashley Conard

About

I am a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research (opens in new tab) Health Futures (opens in new tab) in Cambridge, MA (opens in new tab). As a member of the Biomedical Computing Team lead by Dr. Scott Saponas (opens in new tab), we are building methods for rare disease diagnosis (opens in new tab) with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (opens in new tab). My general research theme is to build expert-centered interpretable methods and platforms to enable more effective decision-making in biomedical and clinical settings. After all, I believe for methods to be useful, they must be used.

I leverage diverse temporal multi-omic sequencing and text data modalities to build interpretable machine learning and probabilistic models that display meaningful outputs (e.g. biological graphs) on interactive platforms for users to perform in-silico hypothesis testing and to ultimately receive catered next step recommendations.

As a researcher with both wet-lab and dry-lab backgrounds, I find it imperative to work collaboratively with end users from the beginning stages of method development through to final platform deployment. I have experience developing methods for small and imbalanced data problems in both human and drosophila datasets. Further, most of my platform development has been in the domains of development, aging, neuroscience, cancer, and now rare disease.

I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science and Computational Biology from Brown University (opens in new tab), where I also completed my Biostatistics (opens in new tab) Postdoctoral research. At Brown I had the privilege of being advised by Dr. Lorin Crawford (opens in new tab), Dr. Erica Larschan (opens in new tab), and Dr. Charles Lawrence (opens in new tab). Outside of school I performed research with Microsoft Research Health Futures, Deloitte, Google Cloud, and Phenome Health where I was honored to be mentored by Dr. Leroy Hood (opens in new tab).

Prior to my Ph.D. I was a Fulbright Research Scholar in Belgium where I had the opportunity to work with Dr. Tom Lenaerts (opens in new tab) to apply game theory in the context of protein design. Outside of research, I spent time engaging with N.A.T.O. and the European Union to learn more about science policy. I also had the privilege to perform high-performance computing research in biodefence with Dr. Jeremy Kepner (opens in new tab) at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

I hold a bachelor’s degree from DePauw University with a focus in Biochemistry and Computer Science, where I also built an organic farm, supported by Dr. Jane Goodall (opens in new tab). I spent most of my time outside of school doing research projects at Google, Vanderbilt University, Eli Lilly, and as a U.S. D-Day Ambassador.

I am a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow (opens in new tab) and a Fulbright Research Scholar (opens in new tab). I have served on several Boards of Trustees including the National Fulbright Association and AnitaB.org (opens in new tab) (flagship conference is Grace Hopper), where I instituted several successful programs. In my spare time I enjoy outreach, playing soccer, gardening, learning languages, and practicing Aikido Kokikai.