PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Leo Anthony Celi

Leo Anthony Celi is a physician and AI researcher whose work connects machine learning with critical-care data. He earned a medical degree in the Philippines, then studied biomedical informatics at MIT and clinical effectiveness at Harvard. He led Sana when it won an mHealth Alliance award, coauthored the MIMIC-III paper, and argued that health-AI education should teach students to inspect training data. As of October 2026, he is clinical research director and principal research scientist at MIT's Laboratory for Computational Physiology, a part-time associate professor at Harvard Medical School, and an attending physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Timeline

  1. 1990–2010

    Medical and data science degrees

    He earns an MD in medicine at the University of the Philippines in 1990, an MSc in biomedical informatics at MIT in 2009, and an MPH in clinical effectiveness at Harvard University School of Public Health in 2010.

  2. 2010

    A Sana mobile-health award

    In 2010, Sana receives the United Nations Foundation's mHealth Alliance Award, with Celi as project lead.

  3. 2016

    The MIMIC-III database

    He coauthors the 2016 paper “MIMIC-III, a freely accessible critical care database.” The paper presents a deidentified, single-center database of intensive-care records for research and higher-education coursework.

  4. 2023

    Bias in healthcare data

    In 2023, he says machine learning can reveal bias in medical data and urges industry to gather and analyze clinical data for every population.

  5. June 2025

    Teaching students to inspect AI data

    In June 2025, he calls for health-AI courses to teach students to identify flaws in training data before they build models. He also describes exploring a transformer model for numeric electronic health records that can reduce the effects of missing data tied to social determinants of health and provider biases.

  6. As of October 2026

    MIT and Harvard faculty roles

    He is clinical research director and principal research scientist at MIT's Laboratory for Computational Physiology, a part-time associate professor at Harvard Medical School, and an attending physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. At MIT's Laboratory for Computational Physiology, he brings clinicians and data scientists together to study data collected in care; his group built and maintains the MIMIC and Philips-MIT eICU databases.

Career

  1. NowMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyClinical Research Director and Principal Research Scientist, Laboratory for Computational Physiology
  2. NowHarvard UniversityPart-time Associate Professor of Medicine
  3. NowBeth Israel Deaconess Medical CenterAttending Physician

Education

  1. 2010Harvard UniversityMPH in Clinical Effectiveness
  2. 2009Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyMSc in Biomedical Informatics
  3. 1990University of the PhilippinesMD in Medicine

From the biography.

Checked career sources: imes.mit.edu, hsph.harvard.edu, caiire.mgh.harvard.edu.

Sources and credits

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  1. Leo Anthony Celi | Institute for Medical Engineering & Science imes.mit.edu. Checked 27 October 2026.
  2. MIMIC-III, a freely accessible critical care database pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Checked 27 October 2026.
  3. Joining the battle against health care bias | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology news.mit.edu. Checked 27 October 2026.
  4. 3 Questions: How to help students recognize potential bias in their AI datasets | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology news.mit.edu. Checked 27 October 2026.
  5. Leo Anthony Celi | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health hsph.harvard.edu. Checked 27 October 2026.
  6. CAIIRE Events - CAIIRE caiire.mgh.harvard.edu. Checked 27 October 2026.