Announcing the 2026 Joseph Leiter Lecture

Posted by Carolyn Martin on May 12th, 2026 Posted in: News from NLM
Tags: Medical Library Association, National Library of Medicine, webinar

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Dr. Regina Barzilay, PhD, School of Engineering Distinguished Professor for AI and Health, MIT, will deliver the 2026 Joseph Leiter National Library of Medicine (NLM)/Medical Library Association (MLA) Lecture.

Lecture Title: How Can AI Models Change Biomedical Discovery?
Date and Time: Wednesday, June 10, 2026, 11:00 a.m. PT | 10:00 a.m. Alaska | 8:00 a.m. Hawaii
Livestream: 2026 Joseph Leiter NLM/MLA Lecture 

Lecture Description: Today, major breakthroughs in understanding disease biology and developing treatments require significant wet lab exploration. Emerging AI algorithms for Electronic Health Records (EHR), image processing, and molecular modeling can potentially provide an alternative means for exploring a large space of possible solutions, enabling scientists to prioritize the most promising hypotheses for testing.  These developments have significant implications for data management, curation, and stewardship. In this talk, the speaker will describe several examples illustrating the power and weaknesses of current AI technology in today’s data landscape.  In the second half of the talk, she will focus on the impact of training data on the performance of AI models in this discovery context and on the ethics and reproducibility considerations.

About Dr. Barzilay: Dr. Barzilay is a School of Engineering Distinguished Professor of AI & Health in the Department of Computer Science and the AI Faculty Lead at MIT Jameel Clinic. She was recently named one of Time100 Most Influential People in AI 2025 and develops machine learning methods for drug discovery and clinical AI. In the past, she worked on natural language processing.

Her research has been recognized with the MacArthur Fellowship, an NSF Career Award, the AAAI Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity, and the IEEE Frances E. Allen Medal for innovative machine learning algorithms that have led to advances in human language technology and demonstrated impact on the field of medicine. Dr. Barzilay is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Barzilay received her BA and MS degrees at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel and holds a PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University.

About the Joseph Leiter NLM/MLA Lectureship: Together since 1983, NLM and MLA, have sponsored the Joseph Leiter Lectureship to stimulate intellectual liaison between MLA and NLM and focuses on subjects related to biomedical communications. Leiter was a major contributor in cancer research at the National Cancer Institute and a leader at NLM as a champion of medical librarians and an informatics pioneer. He served as NLM Associate Director for Library Operations from 1965 to 1983.