Adam Yala

Adam Yala is an assistant professor at UC Berkeley and UCSF who develops machine learning methods for personalized cancer care. At MIT, he helped develop Mirai for predicting breast cancer risk from mammograms and Tempo for personalized screening. He completed his computer science PhD in 2022 and coauthored the lung cancer risk model Sybil in 2023. In 2025, he co-founded Voio with Maggie Chung and Trevor Darrell and helped release Pillar-0, which analyzes 3D medical images. He is Voio’s CEO.

Now at: University of California, Berkeley, University of California, San Francisco and Voio
Works: 69
Citations: 3,107
h-index: 19
Badges: Founder
Bridge

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 27 October 2026.

Timeline

2012–2017

From Algiers to MIT

He grows up in Algiers and begins undergraduate studies at MIT in 2012. After taking Regina Barzilay’s natural language processing class, he starts attending her research group meetings in 2015. He earns a BS in electrical engineering and computer science in 2016 and an MEng in computer science in 2017.
2021

Mirai predicts breast cancer risk

In 2021, Yala is the lead author of the paper on Mirai, a machine learning model that predicts breast cancer risk from mammograms. The team tests it using data from Massachusetts General Hospital, Sweden’s Karolinska Institute and Taiwan’s Chang Gung Memorial Hospital.
January 2022

Tempo personalizes cancer screening

He leads the 2022 paper on Tempo, which uses reinforcement learning to recommend when a patient should return for a mammogram. The system combines AI cancer risk estimates with personalized screening schedules.
2022

MIT doctorate and joint appointment

He completes his computer science PhD at MIT in 2022. In 2022, he joins the UCSF–UC Berkeley Joint Program in Computational Precision Health as one of its first three assistant professors.
2023

Sybil predicts lung cancer risk

In 2023, he coauthors Sybil, a deep learning model that predicts future lung cancer risk from a single low-dose chest CT scan.
2024

A Bakar Spark Award

He receives a Bakar Fellows Spark Award in 2024 for Pillar, a joint project with Maggie Chung of UCSF. The project uses multiple types of breast imaging to build cancer risk models for personalized screening.
November 2025

Voio and Pillar-0

In 2025, he launches Voio with Maggie Chung and Trevor Darrell to build AI tools for radiologists. In November 2025, his university team releases Pillar-0, an open-source model that reads 3D CT and MRI scans to recognize hundreds of conditions; he is the senior author of the research.
2026

The Merlin CT model

He coauthors the 2026 Nature paper on Merlin, a vision-language model that learns from 3D CT scans, electronic health records and radiology reports.
As of October 2026

Assistant professor and Voio CEO

As of October 2026, he is an assistant professor of Computational Precision Health, Statistics and Computer Science at UC Berkeley and UCSF, and co-founder and CEO of Voio. His lab develops machine learning methods for personalized health care, including models that combine patient data and AI-based screening and treatment policies.

Career

Since 2025VoioCo-founder, CEO
Since 2022University of California, BerkeleyAssistant Professor of Computational Precision Health
Since 2022University of California, San FranciscoAssistant Professor of Computational Precision Health
2016–2021MIT CSAIL