A Trailblazing Researcher Describes Her Path to AI and Health Care
A conversation with Johns Hopkins computer scientist Suchi Saria, who is on a mission to augment human care with the latest in AI and machine learning technology
Suchi Saria has never met a challenge she walked away from. In fact, she often runs toward it. Her academic and professional career has been marked by taking on projects that many said were impossible. Growing up in India in Darjeeling, a small town in the foothills of the Himalayas, Saria became interested in computer science at an early age. She would later attend a science boarding school in no small part because it was “ridiculously hard” to get into. And, back then, the majority of her classmates were boys. “There were a lot of norms in India, like girls don’t do this, you can’t do this. The world doesn’t work this way,” she says. “I had to learn the instinct to ignore when people said, ‘It can’t be done, you can’t do this.’ It became where if somebody says something couldn’t be done, I was even more intrigued.”