PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Elham Dolatabadi

Elham Dolatabadi is a machine-learning and health-informatics researcher whose work applies AI to clinical care and health equity. She completed a PhD at the University of Toronto in 2015 on machine-learning approaches to gait modeling, then held roles at University Health Network, RBC and Vector. Her projects have included computer vision for pregnancy sleep studies, FAIIR for youth crisis support, and NLP research on post-COVID case reports and mental-health model evaluation. As of October 2026, she is an assistant professor at York University and principal investigator of the i4Health Research Lab. Her research aims to make foundation models dynamic and adaptive tools for health through iterative learning, alignment, and interpretability.

Timeline

  1. By 2015

    A PhD in gait modeling

    She completes a PhD at the University of Toronto in 2015, developing Bayesian and probabilistic generative machine-learning approaches for human gait modeling.

  2. 2018–2019

    Vector Institute health work

    Vector lists her in its postgraduate affiliate cohort in 2018. In March 2019, she is a Technical AI staff scientist at Vector, after data-science work at RBC and a postdoctoral role at University Health Network.

  3. 2024

    A pregnancy sleep detection model

    In December 2024, she and her team develop a computer-vision tool to identify sleep postures during pregnancy. A 2024 study assesses a model for detecting sleep position in real-world conditions.

  4. 2024

    FAIIR for youth crisis support

    In 2024, she coauthors the FAIIR preprint, a conversational assistant for youth crisis responders. It uses an ensemble of fine-tuned transformer models trained on 780,000 conversations to identify issues and reduce responders’ post-conversation workload.

  5. 2025

    NLP for post-COVID case reports

    In 2025, she coauthors a study that uses natural-language processing to examine how case reports represent social determinants of health in post-COVID research. The team builds a corpus of over 7,000 case reports and annotates a subset of 709 reports with 26 social-determinant types.

  6. 2026

    Mental-health benchmarks for LLMs

    In 2026, she coauthors the EACL paper When Can We Trust LLMs in Mental Health? It introduces MentalBench-100k and MentalAlign-70k. MentalAlign-70k compares four LLM judges with human experts across 70,000 ratings.

  7. As of October 2026

    Adaptive foundation models

    As of October 2026, her research aims to make foundation models dynamic and adaptive tools for health through iterative learning, alignment, and interpretability.

  8. As of October 2026

    York faculty and research leadership

    As of October 2026, she is an assistant professor in Machine Learning and Health Informatics at York’s School of Health Policy and Management, cross-appointed with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the Lassonde School of Engineering. She is a faculty affiliate at Vector and principal investigator of the i4Health Research Lab. She leads the Connected Minds research committee and holds the York Research Chair in Safe AI for Health Equity.

Career

  1. Since 2018Vector InstitutePostgraduate Affiliate, Technical AI Staff Scientist
  2. NowYork UniversityAssistant Professor
  3. NowLassonde School of EngineeringCross-Appointment
  4. NowConnected MindsCommittee Lead

Education

  1. 2015University of TorontoPhD

From the biography.

  1. Of 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google, 446 work there nowIncludes Vector Institute. Our estimates of where the 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google and Google DeepMind work now: 446 at Google and 452 across 278 other organizations.
  2. Nonprofit roles are 2.3 times as common in AI safetyIncludes Vector Institute. We estimate where people focused on safety, alignment and evaluation work. Nonprofit roles appear for 25.1% of safety people with known affiliations, compared with 11.0% in other areas.
  3. Universities (31%) and startups and other companies (25%) employ the largest shares of 2020–2026 entrantsIncludes Vector Institute. Among 819 people whose first recorded role started in 2020–2026 and who have a known current organization, 60% work in commercial sectors (25% at startups and other companies, 23% at frontier labs and 13% at big tech, with 9 in two), and 31% work at universities, compared with 66% for earlier entrants.
  4. The United States employs an estimated 48% of people shaping AIIncludes Vector Institute. We estimate where the people shaping AI work today, how universities, companies and research institutes split across countries, and how country shares have changed since the 1960s.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Elham Dolatabadi yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Health Services, Systems and Policy Seminar Series: Elham Dolatabadi ihpme.utoronto.ca. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Vector Institute Launches Inaugural Postgraduate Affiliate Program vectorinstitute.ai. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. AI could help solve questions about health of sleeping on back after 28-weeks pregnancy yorku.ca. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Transitioning sleeping position detection in late pregnancy using computer vision from controlled to real-world settings: an observational study nature.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. FAIIR: Building Toward A Conversational AI Agent Assistant for Youth Mental Health Service Provision arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Academic Case Reports Lack Diversity: Assessing the Presence and Diversity of Sociodemographic and Behavioral Factors related to Post COVID-19 Condition arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. When Can We Trust LLMs in Mental Health? Large-Scale Benchmarks for Reliable LLM Evaluation aclanthology.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. EDolatabadi elhamdolatabadi.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. Leadership Committee - Connected Minds yorku.ca. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. York Research Chairs yorku.ca. Checked 21 October 2026.
  11. Elham Dolatabadi - Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence vectorinstitute.ai. Checked 21 October 2026.
  12. i4Health - Team insight4healthlab.com. Checked 21 October 2026.