ISyE Seminar Series: Dr. Natalie Sheils

"A Mathematician’s Career in Healthcare and AI"

Dr. Natalie Sheils

AI Scientist/Engineer
Stealth-stage healthcare startup

About the seminar:

This presentation will cover how I went from a graduate student in applied mathematics through a postdoc, to working in healthcare and AI. I will share examples of work on computational tools and data science in healthcare, along with a recent project from a hack-a-thon using generative AI.

Bio:

Natalie Sheils is an AI scientist/ engineer at a stealth-stage healthcare startup. Prior to joining the startup, she was a research scientist at Optum in Healthcare Economics and part of their R&D organization, OptumLabs. Natalie earned her PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Washington and did a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Minnesota School of Mathematics. Her mathematical research focus was analytical solutions to partial differential equations with special attention to the effects of boundary conditions. Natalie is an author of many peer-reviewed journal articles and a frequent speaker at conferences, seminars, and colloquia. She was awarded a graduate research fellowship by the National Science Foundation and many early career and student travel awards from SIAM. Natalie has always maintained interest in policy, especially as it relates to science and served as an early career fellow for the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Committee on Science Policy in 2018 and 2019. Currently, she is serving a three-year term on the American Mathematics Society (AMS) Committee on Science Policy.