MIT News profiled Jordan Harrod, a PhD student at HST MEMP (Medical Engineering and Medical Physics):
Harrod went on to pursue her BS in biomedical engineering at Cornell University. Before graduating, she spent a summer at Stanford University doing machine-learning research for MRI reconstruction. “I didn’t know anything about machine learning before that, so I did a lot of learning on the fly,” she says. “I realized that I enjoyed playing with data in different ways. Machine learning was also becoming the new big thing at the time, so it felt like an exciting path to follow.”
Harrod looked for PhD programs that would combine her interests in helping patients, biomedical engineering, and machine learning. She came across the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST) and realized it would be the perfect fit. The interdisciplinary program requires students to perform clinical rotations and take introductory courses alongside medical students. The MIT Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) is HST’s home at MIT. “I’ve found that the clinical perspective was often underrated on the research side, so I wanted to make sure I’d have that. My goal was that my research would be translatable to the real world,” Harrod says.
Alongside her research, Harrod is also a writer for Massive Science and a well-known YouTuber who examines how we interact with AI in our daily lives.
Stream one of the videos below.
