2026 NLM/MLA Joseph Leiter Lecture | How AI Is Reshaping Biomedical Discovery

2026 NLM/MLA Joseph Leiter Lecture | How AI Is Reshaping Biomedical Discovery Today, major breakthroughs in understanding disease biology and developing treatments require significant wet lab exploration. Emerging AI algorithms for Electronic Health Records (EHR), image processing, and molecular modeling can potentially provide an alternative means for exploring a large space of possible solutions, enabling scientists to prioritize the most promising hypotheses for testing. These developments have significant implications for data management, curation, and stewardship. In this talk, the speaker will describe several examples illustrating the power and weaknesses of current AI technology in today’s data landscape. In the second half of the talk, she will focus on the impact of training data on the performance of AI models in this discovery context and on the ethics and reproducibility considerations. The Joseph Leiter NLM/MLA Lecture was established in 1983 to stimulate intellectual liaison between MLA and NLM. Leiter was a major contributor in cancer research at the National Cancer Institute and a leader at NLM as a champion of medical librarians and an informatics pioneer. He served as NLM Associate Director for Library Operations from 1965 to 1983. Regina Barzilay, PhD, a leading expert in artificial intelligence and health, will present the 2026 Joseph Leiter National Library of Medicine (NLM)/Medical Library Association (MLA) Lecture, highlighting the growing role of AI in biomedical discovery and its implications for libraries. Dr. Barzilay is a School of Engineering Distinguished Professor of AI and Health in the Department of Computer Science at MIT and the AI Faculty Lead at the MIT Jameel Clinic. Named to Time’s 2025 TIME100 Most Influential People in AI, her research focuses on machine learning applications in drug discovery, clinical AI, and—earlier in her career—natural language processing. Her work has been recognized with numerous honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, the AAAI Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity, and the IEEE Frances E. Allen Medal. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.