Kristen A. Severson

I am a principal researcher at Microsoft Research New England where I work on the BioML team. My research focuses on developing machine learning methods for high-impact scientific and healthcare applications, with current emphasis on three areas:

Computational Pathology & Foundation Models. I lead research on large-scale foundation models for digital pathology, including the Virchow and Virchow2 tile-level models and the Prism and Prism2 multi-modal slide-level models. This work was published in Nature Medicine and enables clinical-grade computational pathology and rare cancer detection.

Disease Progression Modeling. I develop probabilistic models that discover disease subtypes and predict progression from longitudinal clinical data. This includes work on Parkinson’s disease (published in The Lancet Digital Health) and ALS (published in Nature Computational Science).

Machine Learning for Science. I apply ML to accelerate scientific discovery, including data-driven prediction of battery cycle life (published in Nature Energy) and Bayesian optimization for sustainable materials design (published in Matter).

Previously, I was a postdoc at the Center for Computational Health and a research staff member in the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab at IBM Research. I received my PhD in chemical engineering from MIT, where I worked in the Braatz lab, and my BS in chemical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.