Dr Fernando Suarez is the Deputy Chief Science Officer for Product Design and Development at IBM Watson Health. In this role he provides scientific, technical, informatics, and evaluative leadership in the design, development, and execution of evaluation research for IBM Watson Health products, and other IBM solutions and initiatives. He leads a team of scientists to deliver a comprehensive scientific research portfolio throughout the product development life cycle. He is responsible for the strategic collaboration between the software development teams. He also provides expertise and guidance in the software development process and interacts directly with development, offering management and design teams to provide scientific guidance and input. He’s held the position of Senior Scientist and served as Medical Science Lead at IBM Watson Health, where he applied a scientific approach to problem solving to help lead design, prototype, and development of novel ways to understand, interpret and gain insights from written medical records, published medical literature and clinical trials as well as Real World Evidence with particular focus on Oncology Solutions.
Fernando has a background in biomedical sciences, computer science, information theory, data summarization and visualization that he uses to prototype new ways for physicians and other healthcare professionals to understand, view and interact with data. Fernando works closely with software engineers, software developers, designers
and data scientists in the design and implementation of AI, medical Natural Language Processing (NLP) and analytics algorithms to solve real world clinical problems.
Fernando’s focus on innovation has led to several patent applications submitted since he joined IBM, most of them on the application of Artificial Intelligence in healthcare and life sciences. He has also received an Outstanding Technical Achievement Award for his work on novel NLP and Medical Language Understanding and interpretation of published clinical trial studies in oncology.
Fernando holds a Medical Degree and attended graduate school at The University of Toronto's Institute of Medical Sciences. He then completed 2 postdoctoral fellowships at the Ontario Cancer Institute focused on systems biology of cancer and drug target identification.