Speakers - Health AI Institute

Speakers

Welcome to the AI Spring Summit 2025! We’re bringing together leading experts across healthcare, science, and technology to share their insights. Get ready to hear from the industry’s top voices as they explore how AI is developed, regulated, and applied in real-world healthcare, academic, and policy settings.

Meet Our Speakers

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Co-Chair, Senate AI Caucus
U.S. Senate, South Dakota

Chair, Senate Democratic Steering & Policy Committee
U.S. Senate, Minnesota

Senior Advisor, Innovation Lead
U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services (ONC)

CEO
Sanford Health

Chair, Senate Democratic Steering & Policy Committee
U.S. Senate, Minnesota

Acting Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy (ASTP)
Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), US

Congresswoman

HEALTHCARE AI SUMMIT 2025 SPEAKERS

Vice President
University of California Irvine Health

Chair, Senate Democratic Steering & Policy Committee
U.S. Senate, Minnesota

Vice President
University of California Irvine Health

Professor, Computer Science
University of Minnesota

Global Chief AI Officer
Medtronic

Regent Professor, Computer Science
UMN

Managing Partner
Bread and Butter Ventures

MD, Health Ventures & Innovation
UCI Health

Chairman and Senior Fellow
Health AI Institute

Chief Medical Information Officer
Mayo Clinic

President
Regions Hospital & Foundation

Chief Medical Information Officer
Microsoft

Managing Director
Rex Health Ventures

Managing Director
Health AI Institute

Physician Chair
Mayo Clinic

Professor of Surgery and Health Informatics
UMN
Chief Analytics & Care Innovation Officer
Fairview Health Services

Chief Executive Officer
Guide Health

Managing Director, MedTech
Greater MSP Partnership

Adjunct Prof, Medicine & Public Health
University of Minnesota

Chief Information & Digital Health Officer
UC Davis Health

Ex Chief Medical & Scientific Officer
Medtronic, Inc.

Founder, Managing Partner

Chief Health Information Officer
Hennepin Healthcare

Minnesota House of Representatives

Minnesota House of Representatives

Minnesota State Senator

Commissioner & Chief Information Officer
State of Minnesota, Minnesota IT Services

Principal
Medical Alley Starts

Senior AI Policy Analysis
Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC)

Associate Professor of Surgery
University of Minnesota

Director
IHI -UMN

Senator
Minnesota Senate Representative

SPRING RESEARCH WORKSHOP 2025 SPEAKERS

Chair
DSAI Hub

Senior HPC-/AI Account Executive
Nor-Tech

Sr. Manager, Healthcare & MedTech
NVIDIA

Senior Product Manager AI Strategy
Associated Press

AI Policy Analyst Center for AI and Digital Policy

Adjunct Professor, Privacy, AI, and Product Attorney Georgetown Law

Technology & Data Law Expert
Fredrikson & Byron

Assistant Managing Editor, Chief Data Officer, and Head of Audience
The New York Times

Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science & Engineering
UMN College of Science and Engineering

Assistant Professor
Division of Health Policy & Management

Government Publications Librarian
University of Minnesota

User Engagement Manager
IPUMS

Professor
Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota

Project Director
Mapping Prejudice Project

Director
Accessibility Observatory at the University of Minnesota Center for Transportation Studies

Professor and Chief
Division of Computational Health Sciences, University of Minnesota Medical School

Co-Chair, DSAI Hub
Director, University of Minnesota Research Computing

Stay tuned for the speakers list of the AI Spring Research Workshop – coming soon!

Your Questions Matter

Our speakers want to hear from you!

What are the most important questions that can drive progress in AI health technology? This is your chance to engage with top experts at THE AI SPRING SUMMIT 2025.

Submit your question using the form provided.
Our team of AI experts will review all submissions.
The most impactful questions will be selected for discussion during the summit.

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Bill Gassen

President and Chief Executive Officer

Bill Gassen is president and CEO of Sanford Health, an $11 billion integrated health system serving communities primarily across the upper Midwest.

Headquartered in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Sanford Health is dedicated to transforming the health care experience and providing access to world-class health care in America’s heartland.

Since taking on the role of president and CEO in 2020, Bill has been dedicated to strengthening quality, sustainability, and access to care for patients across the upper Midwest. In 2022, he announced that Sanford Health’s strategic position and aspirational goal is to be the premier rural health system in the United States, with a commitment to ensuring the quality of care a person receives is not limited by their zip code.

Sanford Health’s mission to provide world-class care close to home led to new partnerships with Black Hills Orthopedic and Spine Center and Black Hills Surgical Hospital in 2024, and Marshfield Clinic Health System and Security Health Plan in 2025. Through these strategic partnerships, Sanford Health is improving access to care for more patients than ever before and providing new opportunities for its providers to accelerate clinical innovation and research through nearly 1,500 active clinical trials and studies.

In 2024, Bill led Sanford Health through a historic transformation with the opening of the new Sanford Health Virtual Care Center in Sioux Falls, SD. The Virtual Care Center is part of Sanford’s $350 million virtual care initiative designed to reimagine the future of care delivery and train the next generation of clinicians.

Sanford Health serves 2.4 million patients and nearly 425,000 health plan members across the upper Midwest including South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wyoming, Iowa, Wisconsin, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The integrated nonprofit health system includes 56 hospitals, more than 288 clinic locations, 147 senior care communities, and 4,000 physicians and advanced practice providers.

In 2022, 2023, and 2024, Bill was recognized by Modern Healthcare as one of the 100 Most Influential People in Healthcare. This prestigious recognition honors individuals deemed by their peers and the senior editors of Modern Healthcare to be the most influential figures in the industry in terms of leadership and impact.

Bill is a former litigator and a current member of the State Bar of South Dakota. He holds a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and a law degree, both from the University of South Dakota. Over his twelve-year tenure at Sanford Health, he has served in several leadership roles including chief administrative officer, corporate counsel, and chief human resources officer.

He currently serves on the Board of Trustees of the American Hospital Association, the Board of Directors for Oscar Health, Inc. (NYSE: OSCR), the Board of Directors for Medical Alley, and the Board of Directors for the Greater Sioux Falls Chamber of Commerce. Bill also serves as chair of the Coalition to Strengthen America’s Healthcare.

Bill comes from a family dedicated to public service. His mother spent four decades as a hospital nurse, and his father served in the Air Force. Bill was born on a military base in Little Rock, Arkansas, and spent most of his childhood in Rapid City, South Dakota. His father played a key role in the development of Feeding South Dakota, the state’s largest charitable hunger-relief organization, and served as its CEO for more than 20 years.

Bill and his wife, Jill, a physician’s assistant for the Veterans Administration, have five children and reside in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Gopal Khanna

Chairman and Senior Fellow, Health AI Institute

An accomplished corporate executive, entrepreneur and a distinguished public servant, Gopal Khanna is a serial transformational change agent. His experience, expertise and passion centers at the intersection of healthcare, artificial intelligence, and government. He has held senior executive positions in industry, launched startup ventures and consulted with industry and political leaders

Additionally, Mr. Khanna has held senior public policy positions and has served in the administration of two governors and two presidents. Most recently, Mr. Khanna served as the Director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) at HHS from May 2017 through January 2021 in the administration of President Donald J. Trump, where he led the Agency’s mission of producing evidence to make delivery of healthcare safer, higher quality and more accessible to the American people.

Prior to his leadership position at AHRQ, Mr. Khanna was director of Illinois’ Healthcare and Human Services Innovation Incubator (HHSi2), an initiative of Governor Bruce Rauner. Earlier, Mr. Khanna was a member of Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty’s Cabinet, Commissioner and the State’s first chief information officer (CIO). Prior to that, he served in the administration of President George W. Bush in a number of senior policy and executive positions, including CFO and CIO of the United States Peace Corps, and CFO of the Executive Office of the President at the White House.

As a Board and CXO-advisor, Mr. Khanna has helped leaders in business, technology, government and nonprofits to pivot to scale value for customers and stakeholders. A former corporate executive he has also launched Hi-Tech startup ventures from his basement.

Mr. Khanna is Executive-in-Residence at the Medical Industry Leadership Institute at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota. He is founder of Health AI Institute and is working with leaders in the industry and academia to stand up a nonpolitical, nonpartisan 501 (c) 3 nonprofit organization that provides a platform for industry leaders to deliberate, design and develop solutions to help further continued excellence of Minnesota’s healthcare & life sciences ecosystem.

Mr. Khanna has served on several industry, non-profit and community work groups and boards, and has been recognized nationally for his innovative and transformational work in government and industry in publications. He was listed by Twin Cities Business as “200 Minnesotans You Should Know” and was cited as a “Doer, Dreamer, and Driver” in Government Technology‘s listing of Top 25 public sector innovators.

Ashish Atreja

App Doctor| UC Davis Health | United States
Venture Partner, GVX.vc (Global Ventures Accelerator)
Professor of Medicine, UC Davis Health

Ashish Atreja, M.D., M.P.H., F.A.C.P., A.G.A.F., is a professor, entrepreneur and an investor who is the nation’s leading voice in evidence-based digital health and AI-led transformation. He has served as CIO and Chief Digital Health Officer at UC Davis Health that expanded the institution’s digital and AI footprint, transformed healthcare delivery and improved patient outcomes. Within two years of his arrival, UC Davis Health became the only health system in California to be digital health most wired level 10 for both inpatient and ambulatory care.

Prior to his UC Davis Health appointment, Atreja, an internist and gastroenterologist, served as the chief innovation officer, Medicine at Mount Sinai Health System. At Mount Sinai, Atreja established one of the first innovation hubs within an academic medical center to build and test disruptive digital health technologies – those that transform the industry. His pioneering work in digital therapeutics, including prescribing mobile health apps for patients, has earned him the nickname ‘the app doctor ‘.

Previously, Atreja was at the Cleveland Clinic, where he was Associate Program Director for Informatics Fellowship, led electronic health record implementation, and won an innovation award for developing one of the first virtual pager and messaging applications that was successfully licensed.

In 2016, Atreja established the non-profit Network of Digital Medicine (NODE.Health) Association to connect innovation centers worldwide and share best practices for evidence-based digital medicine between industry, payers and health systems. As an intrapreneur, Atreja has won innovation awards at Cleveland Clinic and Mount Sinai, holds two patents (including one for creating app formulary prescribed from EHR), successfully licensed technologies from academic centers, and served as a founding CEO for a VC-backed digital health spinout that got acquired last year.

In 2023, Dr Atreja launched VALIDAI.Health: A collective of 50+ Health systems and health plans with tech partners to build capacity among healthcare organizations to co-validate, execute, and create value from Generative AI in Health. He is currently focused on incubating AI ventures through venture studio.

In addition to a medical degree, Atreja holds a master’s in public health and is a fellow of the American College of Physicians and the American Gastroenterological Association. He has served in many national roles, including as an informatics expert for the CDC HICPAC committee, as an associate editor for the Journal of Digital Biomarkers, as an executive board member for ONC and HL7 FHIR at Scale (FAST) accelerator, and representing UCs on the California-wide Data Exchange Advisory Committee.

He has been nominated among the Top 40 HealthCare Transformers in 2017, HIMSS Top 50 Healthcare in 2021 and Health Tech Magazine Top 30 Health IT influencers in 2022. Atreja has published more than 100 academic papers, has been continuously funded by NIH since 2014, and has been a keynote speaker globally on digital health transformation.

Tarek Tomes

Commissioner and Chief Information Officer, State of Minnesota, Minnesota IT Services

Tarek Tomes serves as the Commissioner of Minnesota IT Services (MNIT) and the State of Minnesota’s Chief Information Officer (CIO), leading state efforts to champion an innovative digital government that works for all.

As the state’s top technologist, Tomes collaborates with state government, local governments, and the private sector to advocate for the use of technology for the betterment of Minnesotans. He strives to foster innovation, promote data-driven decision-making, and deliver government services that are agile, accessible, and user-friendly.

With a focus on modernizing technology, Tomes has played a pivotal role in transforming crucial government services, including those related to driver and vehicle services. Amid the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, his efforts facilitated a seamless transition to a remote workforce, benefiting over 35,000 executive branch workers.

Recognized as a leader in data-driven decision-making, Tomes contributes to Minnesota’s national prominence in this field. The state’s commitment to digital excellence was evident in achieving an ‘A’ grade from the Center for Digital Government, positioning Minnesota among the top five nationally. Serving as a key driver of the One Minnesota Customer Experience goal, he has effectively utilized digital services to enhance and streamline interactions between Minnesotans and government services, ensuring a user-friendly and efficient experience for all.

Before becoming Commissioner, Tomes served as the Chief Innovation Officer and former Chief Information Officer at the City of St. Paul, where he was responsible for managing ongoing process improvements, supporting human-centered design, and increasing the overall effectiveness of city services and resources. While in St. Paul, Tomes facilitated a digital transformation at the city level, pioneering the use of mobile applications to improve resident opportunities. This work allowed the city to leverage deep data insights while promoting and supporting equitable service delivery. During his time as St. Paul’s Chief Information Officer, Tomes oversaw the launch of St. Paul’s Open Information Portal, which serves to promote and encourage innovative uses of data and transparency in government services.

Tomes’ prior work experience also includes six years as an Assistant Commissioner of Minnesota IT Services, where he created several nation-leading Information Technology sourcing agreements for 33,000+ user utility services statewide – including the first cloud-based public sector statewide service offering in the nation. While Tomes was serving in this role, Minnesota became the first state in the country to manage all Information Technology through service level agreements, a model that was recognized with a national award. Before joining state service, Tomes spent 13 years working for British Telecom.

Tomes received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland and attended Graduate School for Business Management at Boston University.

Constantin Aliferis

Director, IHI -UMN

Dr. Constantin Aliferis earned an MD from Athens University School of Medicine, Greece, and then moved to the USA where he earned MS and PhD degrees in Intelligent Systems (focus: Medical Informatics) and completed post-doctoral training in Machine Learning in Biomedicine. He started his faculty career at Vanderbilt University in 2000 where he led the Discovery Systems Lab, a leading laboratory for biomedical Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
From 2008 to 2015, he served as the Founding Director of the Center for Health Informatics and Bioinformatics (CHIBI) at NYU where he also served as Informatics Director for the NYU CTSI, Scientific Director of the NYULMC High Performance Computing Facility, Leader of the hospital value-based analytics group, and Informatics Director of the NYU Cancer Institute.
In June 2015 he joined the University of Minnesota (UMN) as Chief Research Informatics Officer, Director of the Institute for Health Informatics (IHI) (a university-wide entity that homes presently 24 core and 60 affiliate faculty who specialize in health AI and other forms of health informatics).
During his career he has held tenured faculty positions at NYU and UMN and had faculty appointments in the areas of Biomedical Informatics, Computer Science, Cancer Biology, Biostatistics, Computational Biology, Pathology, Data Science and Medicine. He has also been a regular faculty member of three NCI-funded Cancer Centers and several more NIH-funded centers (including the recent Human Cellular Senescence Tissue Mapping Center that he co-leads with Dr. Laura Niedernhofer). He also served as architect and director of the Vanderbilt MS/PhD programs in Biomedical Informatics, and of the NYU MS and PhD programs in biomedical Informatics. At the UMN he oversees a MS, a MHI and a PhD program in Health Informatics offering extensive AI training and AI-focused degrees, and several collaborative programs with other health science schools.
His research is focused on developing, validating, benchmarking, automating, and applying novel Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods designed to transform healthcare and health discovery. He specializes in predictive and causal machine learning, optimal feature selection, equivalence class modeling, and other methods. His group is linked with groundbreaking discoveries including the first scalable local and global causal discovery algorithms that can learn causality with millions of variables, best of class Markov Boundary methods, Target Information Equivalence Algorithms, Active Experimentation algorithms, and highly innovative modeling and applications of AI in scientometrics, text categorization, www filtering, and information retrieval. The units he oversees since 2015 have had >$1.5billion in collaborative federal grant proposals (~25% funded). His personal past and current grants portfolio as PI, MPI, Co-PI, and Co-I exceeds $320million of federal funding.
Recently he has been focusing on best practices for safe and effective deployment of AI in the health space. Recent main areas of application include longevity and aging science, cardio metabolic outcomes, psychiatry, precision medicine, cancer research, state-wide Pharmacogenomics in the state of MN, information retrieval and science of science. He has published more than 110 peer reviewed publications, co-authored 5 books on AI in health science and healthcare, including the first book on Personalized and Precision Medicine Informatics (Springer 2020), and the first volume ever on Best Practices and Pitfalls of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in healthcare and the health sciences (Springer, 2024). His publications have received >13,000 citations, his recent AI book has in May of 2025, 195,000 downloads and he has also overseen the creation of machine learning software for research with >4,000 academic and commercial users.
He has taught AI and Machine Learning to a variety of audiences, from early graduate students to experienced faculty. He has also mentored dozens of students and faculty who are now science leaders across notable US and international institutions. He has also been awarded 18 patents and co-founded and led several entrepreneurial efforts in the space of AI and Machine Learning technology.
Among recognitions received, he served as advisor to many large universities/NIH grants, corporations, and Minnesota Department of Health as well as the USA Environmental protection Agency. He leads good modeling practices for the NIH SenNet consortium. He is an elected Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, of the Sigma-Xi Honor Society, he is Chair-elect of the nation-wide Chairs group of American Medical Informatics Association, and is induced in the Elsevier list of the top 2% most-impactful scientists worldwide.