Cassandra Parent

Hello! My name is Cassandra (Cassie) Parent, and I’m a PhD student at MIT and Harvard Medical School in the Medical Engineering and Medical Physics program. I am supervised by Prof. Marzyeh Ghassemi and supported by the NSF GRFP.

My research broadly focuses on developing equitable machine learning models for underserved, chronic health conditons. This is achieved through two key directions 1) creating accurate estimations in wellness care and 2) creating methods to debias off-the-shelf ML models that are frequently being deployed in healthcare settings. By focusing on these directions, we will hopefully create new equitable ML tools while also improving debiasing techniques for cutting-edge industry models to expand their use case.

Previously, I have worked with Prof. Suchi Saria at Johns Hopkins University on analyzing provider factors that increased interaction with a machine learning sepsis decision support tool. I have also worked as an intern at Bayesian Health which spun out of the lab’s research.

My other work includes serving as a research assistant at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine where I focused on using data-driven approaches to decrease healthcare disparities in underserved Latino populations. I also led my undergraduate captsone project team in developing a novel internal hemorrhage diagnostic tool for prehospital settings. We raised over $75,000 in student grants, have presented our work at the Military Health Science and Research Symposium, and received a patent for the device.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions!