Anitha Kannan, Ph.D., Vice President of AI at Curai Health, is a researcher and leader in applying artificial intelligence to healthcare. Curai Health is revolutionizing primary care delivery through AI-powered virtual consultations, making quality healthcare accessible and affordable at scale. As a founding team member, Dr. Kannan has played a pivotal role in shaping Curai Health’s AI strategy, positioning the company at the forefront of safe, reliable, and regulatory-compliant AI deployed in primary care.
Dr. Kannan brings nearly two decades of experience in machine learning research, spanning both foundational theory and real-world applications. Under her technical leadership, Curai Health has published over twenty peer-reviewed articles addressing critical challenges at the intersection of healthcare and AI. Several of these specifically focus on understanding large language models and addressing their inherent limitations—how does one handle hallucinations and omissions, and how do we begin designing clinically oriented metrics for AI-driven inference? More fundamental questions, such as how AI can be trained to predict the likelihood of a rare disease, when the underlying AI often lacks sufficient training data to do so. This commitment to applied research reflects her team’s dedication to advancing the responsible deployment of AI in healthcare, rather than simply adopting new technologies.
Dr. Kannan is deeply committed to rigorous validation and thoughtful design in AI systems, ensuring patient safety and reliability. Her team’s research on Dialog-Enabled Resolving Agents was the first to identify and address key gaps in the large language model’s clinical reasoning abilities, demonstrating that models perform significantly worse on open-ended diagnostic tasks compared to multiple-choice formats. They also introduced early methods to overcome hallucination and omission for (then) challenging tasks, such as medical summarization. Additionally, her team has pioneered work in developing guardrails, clinically grounded evaluations, and synthetic data simulation strategies to improve AI performance and safety. Dr. Kannan also co-leads Curai’s healthcare AI governance and compliance initiatives, establishing the frameworks that enable safe deployment of generative AI in clinical settings.
Previously, Dr. Kannan held senior research positions at Meta’s Fundamental AI Research and Microsoft Research. At Microsoft, she led collaborative work with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute on computational biology approaches to understanding complex diseases. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science with a specialization in Machine Learning from the University of Toronto and was a Darwin Fellow at the University of Cambridge, UK.
We are excited to welcome Dr. Kannan to our DOC 2025 group of Specialists!