Cassandra Parent

Mar. 2026: Co-authored paper on LLM non-affirmation behaviors for human rights accepted into FAccT 2026!
Mar. 2026: Recipient of the Roger G. Mark Outstanding Service Award for the co-founding and development of the IMES Bookclub for discussions focused on healthcare reform and medical crises.
Jan. 2026: Co-authored paper on rotational debiasing for VLMs accepted into ICLR 2026!
May 2025: My team won the inaugural MIT Women’s Health in AI Hackathon for our project on predicting maternal interpersonal violence.

Hello! My name is Cassandra (Cassie) Parent, and I’m a PhD candidate 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 work sits at the intersection of AI safety and clinical decision support (CDS), using high-stakes healthcare settings to study how models behave when they encounter complex, heterogeneous, and poorly defined real-world problems. I develop methods to discover hidden biases and harmful associations, characterize model behavior across populations and contexts, and improve the safety and reliability of models beyond what can be captured by standard offline benchmarks. I often using women’s health conditions as a case study to assess model behavior as I strive to develop more equitable decision-support systems with clinical and economic utility.

Prior Work

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, TREWS. I have also worked as an intern at Bayesian Health where I worked on the FDA application for TREWS which was recently approved!

My other prior work has included 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.

Misc.

I love to read and co-founded the IMES Bookclub through the Health Science Technologies Program. I also write, play chess, and generally enjoy being mediocre in a variety of athletic pursuits.