Interview: Meet Doctor Google

Craig Mermel is currently the Research Lead in Pathology at Google Health where he leads a team focused on accelerating the application of machine learning for improved diagnosis of important human diseases, especially cancer. Prior to joining Google, Craig worked at Apple on the Apple Watch and related health initiatives. Mermel completed a joint MD/PhD training at Harvard Medical School, where he developed novel statistical methods for mining the cancer genome for his PhD dissertation. He conducted residency training in Clinical Pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital and is board-certified in Clinical Pathology. What initially sparked your interest in medicine and subsequently, AI in medicine? As a child, I was always interested in mathematics. I thought it was a lot cooler than science, so I dreamt of becoming a mathematician or a code breaker. When I was a high school freshman, we had a chemistry teacher who was this amazing human being, a cancer survivor who taught me to appreciate science. He was the one who opened my door to this amazing yet mysterious subject.