Today, health data are mostly locked up in small sandboxes, controlled by a handful of private companies or well-resourced researchers. Nightingale Open Science aims to unlock those data, securely and ethically, and make them available for the public good. Just as ImageNet jump-started the field of machine vision, Nightingale seeks to build a community of researchers working in the new scientific field of "computational medicine."
Nightingale Open Science seeks an experienced and strategic leader to manage and grow the organization’s ability to create, curate, and disseminate new medical datasets linking images (radiology, pathology, waveforms, etc) to health outcomes. These datasets are Nightingale’s key product and thus of central importance to the organization. The successful candidate will combine three key skills: first, a strong clinical background built up over years of practice (i.e., residency or greater). Second, demonstrated experience working with clinical data, e.g., via health data warehouses, claims data, or clinically-oriented research. Third, an ability to develop and manage technical teams, and work across disciplines with internal and external stakeholders. Applicants must have strong communication skills, the ability to both lead and execute in a startup environment, and a strong commitment to collaboration.
Founded in 2019, we believe this Nightingale Open Science will be transformative in expanding medical knowledge. Over the past 100 years, we have made enormous strides in understanding how the body works, and how it fails. But deep and unsolved mysteries remain. For example, sudden cardiac death kills 300,000 Americans every year, but even in the rear-view mirror, doctors can find no identifiable cause for the majority. The key to solving these problems will lie in the massive volumes of complex, high-dimensional data health systems produce every day: electrocardiograms, x-rays and CT scans, digital pathology images, and more. In our current health system, these data are interpreted by humans. But machines have new ways of ‘seeing’ signals and patterns in the data that humans cannot.
Launched in 2021 at NeurIPS, Nightingale is a non-profit, open platform housing these de-identified medical datasets, and making them available to a diverse, global community of researchers. Nightingale funds and collaboratively builds these datasets with health systems around the world, then makes the de-identified datasets available on a secure cloud platform. By focusing on data that link medical images with real patient outcomes – rather than doctors’ opinions – Nightingale enables the creation of algorithms that learn from nature – not from humans – and fosters groundbreaking research bridging computer science and clinical medicine.
Apply NowNightingale Open Science is a nonprofit incubating at the Center for Applied AI at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Our mission is to connect AI researchers with clinically relevant medical datasets and to facilitate serious, peer reviewed science for public good.
We’re looking for an entry- to mid-level developer to work closely with our CTO.
In January 2022 we released five world-class research datasets on the Nightingale OS platform, a hosted development environment. Data use agreements stipulate that data must remain within our environment, so our engineering challenge is to provide cost-effective, on-demand, high-performance computing with strong security controls, while allowing research teams to be very productive.