IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2021 - 41

Kalpathy-Cramer
in the QTIM lab.
They moved to Singapore for one
year and then to Germany for a year for
her husband's job, and simultaneously,
Kalpathy-Cramer completed another
master's degree in biomedical informatics
from Oregon Health and Science
University. " I had wanted to pivot, and
this provided a great opportunity to take
some time off again and get officially
trained and figure out what I wanted to
do next, " she explains.
That turned out to be academia. As
the family returned to Oregon after two
years, the program where she had done
her distance learning invited KalpathyCramer
to join as a postdoc researcher
and then as an instructor. During her
training, Kalpathy-Cramer had done a
project in medical image analysis and
machine learning that sparked her passion,
and she credits her engineering
background with helping her get into
the field. " In a lot of ways, it was the
training in signal processing and other
areas I'd studied during my undergrad
and graduate studies in electrical engineering
that helped me do this work, "
she says.
An opportunity with a grant allowed
her to transition fully into faculty, moving
to Boston in 2011 to become a researcher
affiliated with Harvard Medical School
and Massachusetts General Hospital
(MGH). She is currently also the director
of the Quantitative Translational Imaging
in Medicine (QTIM) Lab and the Center
for Machine Learning at the Athinoula A.
Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging,
an associate professor of radiology at
MGH/Harvard Medical School, and scientific
director at MGH and Brigham
and Women's Hospital Center for Clinical
Data Science.
" We work in applying machine learning
to health care, mostly
to image analysis, though
not exclusively. We have
postdocs, Ph.D. students,
undergraduates, and even
high school students in
our lab, all working on the
development and application
of machine learning
and artificial intelligence
(AI) in health care, " she
describes. Kalpathy-Cramer
points out that her
program tries to attract
students at all stages of
their education, and works
especially hard at getting
more women and diverse
candidates into programs.
" Diversity of voices for
any problem is important,
not just women, but people
of different backgrounds, "
she says. " If we have only
one approach and one way
of thinking, we don't have
as rich a solution as we can get if we
have people of different perspectives. "
When the COVID-19 pa ndemi c
arrived, the lab pivoted to working on
COVID-related research. The teams
developed good ways of quantifying how
severely impacted the lungs are based on
chest X-rays, a useful tool for clinicians
on the front lines. They also developed
Kalpathy-Cramer rock climbing in California at Joshua
Tree National Park.
DECEMBER 2021
IEEE WOMEN IN ENGINEERING MAGAZINE
41
IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2021

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