Engy Ziedan
Engy Ziedan is an applied health economist who serves as Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of Protege, an AI data infrastructure company. She holds a position as Assistant Professor at Indiana University and was previously Assistant Professor of Economics at Tulane University. Her research uses causal inference and econometric methods to analyze large-scale healthcare data, with work cited by the CDC and featured in outlets including The New York Times and NPR.
“Protege's founding insight, written in a 2024 Google Doc by co-founder Bobby, was that models would be constrained by the quality and reality of their training data — long before the broader market arrived at that conclusion.”
Source→“Models, you know, can score up to like 92% on a licensing exam but 45% on a real-world clinical task. And so, like, acing a benchmark doesn't make an AI ready for the hospital just like a perfect MCAT score... doesn't make for a great surgeon.”
Source→“When people talk about kind of like safety and alignment, right, there is the catastrophic failure, which is something goes wrong. Can you prevent that? Actually, I do think that that problem is easier because catastrophic failure is like narrow... The harder one is misalignment broadly and subtle bias.”
Source→“Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Protege. Healthcare economist, assistant professor at Indiana University (previously at Tulane).”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.