Meet the experts behind Google Health's healthcare technology advancements
Our team of experts is committed to transforming the future of health through scientific excellence, human-centered technologies, and trusted infrastructure. Our team roll call includes engineers, clinicians, designers, researchers and everything in between, all committed to helping everyone live more life everyday. And at our core is a dedication to diversity, equity, and inclusion—from how we build our products to how we build our workforce.
Backed by health expertise
All Google Health initiatives — from new products to research — are designed and developed in close collaboration with clinicians who are experts in their fields. Our team’s experience and expertise span decades of clinical practice, public health, health economics research, and AI and machine learning in medicine — ensuring that Google Health initiatives adhere to the highest clinical standards.
Dr. Karen DeSalvo
Chief Health Officer
Dr. Karen DeSalvo is a physician executive working at the intersection of medicine, public health, and information technology whose career has focused on improving health and eliminating disparities. She leads a team of health professionals at Google who provide guidance for the development of inclusive research, products and services. She has been part of the Google COVID response team. Before joining Google, Dr. DeSalvo was National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and Assistant Secretary for Health (Acting) in the Obama Administration. During her time at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Dr. DeSalvo focused on creating a more consumer-oriented, transparent and value-based health system. Dr. DeSalvo served as the New Orleans Health Commissioner following Hurricane Katrina. She was previously Vice Dean for Community Affairs and Health Policy at the Tulane School of Medicine where she was a practicing internal medicine physician, educator, researcher and leader. She serves on the Council of the National Academy of Medicine.
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Dr. Michael Howell
Chief Clinical Officer and Deputy Chief Health Officer
Dr. Michael Howell’s career focuses on improving the quality, safety, and experience of care, including how technology can help improve health. A nationally recognized expert on healthcare delivery science, he has served on advisory panels for the Centers for Disease Control, Medicare, and the National Academy of Medicine. His writings, cited by other researchers more than 10,000 times, have had an impact on the field and are incorporated in several national guidelines. A pulmonary and critical care physician, he also spent many years caring for patients at Harvard and at the University of Chicago, where he served as Chief Quality Officer.
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Bakul Patel
Senior Director, Global Digital Health Strategy & Regulatory
Bakul Patel is focused on building a unified digital health strategy that is aligned with evolving global regulatory needs. Mr. Patel's vision is to help realize the potential of technology and its role in democratizing access to high quality, equitable healthcare. Prior to joining Google, Mr. Patel held the position of the Chief Digital Health Officer of Global Strategy and innovation and Director for Digital Health Center of Excellence, at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In these roles, he provided thought leadership and expertise, and shaped responsible regulation for digital health. Mr. Patel coined the term “Software as a Medical device” (SaMD), and built a risk framework for medical device regulators globally. He was also the architect of the software precertification pilot program and the framework for Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML)-based software.
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Dr. Ivor Braden Horn
Director of Health Equity and Product Inclusion
Dr. Ivor Horn, MD, MPH, FAAP, is a nationally recognized leader in health equity, social determinants of health and healthcare innovation. Prior to her role at Google, Dr. Horn served as Chief Medical Officer at Accolade. Before Accolade, she served as Medical Director of the Center for Diversity and Health Equity at Seattle Children’s Hospital, and Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Dr. Horn is also a nationally recognized researcher with a history of funding from government and non-profit organizations to research the use of technology in under-represented populations. She has authored several peer-reviewed journal publications on health communication and health equity.
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Lara Garcia
Health Compliance Strategy & Business Solutions Lead
Lara is a health compliance leader who has more than 15 years of health compliance experience. Prior to joining Google, she held senior compliance roles in top Fortune 500 health companies. She has successfully led global teams dedicated to advancing trust and integrity through innovative compliance program design and delivery. Lara also started her professional career in Silicon Valley at two early healthcare start-ups. Lara received her Master's in Public Health from the University of California, Los Angeles and her Bachelor of Science in Microbiology from the University of California, San Diego.
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Dr. Sohini Stone
Chief Medical Officer for Global Employee Health
Dr. Sohini Stone, MD, MBA, leads the Global Employee Health team at Google, focused on cross-company strategy to provide an integrated portfolio of equitable, evidence-based programs and services to promote health and wellbeing of Google’s workforce, their family members, and the community around them, across the spectrum of physical, mental and social health. Dr. Stone has a background in quality, patient safety, and process improvement. Prior to joining Google, she led clinical, quality, and business analytics teams at a late stage Silicon Valley health start-up. Dr. Stone received both her Medical Degree and Masters in Business Administration from Boston University, completed Pediatrics residency at Dartmouth Medical School, and Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine Fellowship at Stanford/Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital.
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Innovation through research, experimentation and discovery
Transformative healthcare technologies depend on groundbreaking translational research. At Google Health we’ve embraced a model of embedded research and development where scientists work in tight integration with product and engineering teams. Our inherently collaborative and multidisciplinary approach lends itself naturally to researchers of diverse backgrounds and expertise, able to cross the boundaries of clinical science, artificial intelligence, informatics, and user centered design.
Dr. Maria Nattestad
Software Engineer
Dr. Maria Nattestad is a software engineer on the genomics team in Google Health, where she works on DeepVariant, a deep learning based variant caller for genomic sequencing data. She focuses on building tools to make high-quality genetic information accessible to scientists, clinicians, and patients to help them make better health decisions. Prior to joining Google, she completed a PhD at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, working on algorithms and visualization tools for using long-range genomic data in cancer research. After her PhD, she built a genomic visualization software business, along with a YouTube channel called OMGenomics where she gives people around the world advice on pursuing bioinformatics.
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Dr. Yuan Liu
Software Engineer
Dr. Yuan Liu is a software engineer on the dermatology team in Google Health. She currently leads various dermatology related research and development efforts, with a focus on building AI assistant tools to improve the world’s access to accurate information and care for everyone. She also worked on applying computer vision techniques to large-scale user generated content in Google Maps. Prior to joining Google, she obtained her PhD in medical image processing at Vanderbilt University, where she conducted intelligent analysis of radiology images (CT, MRI) to advance image-guided neurosurgical procedures. She currently serves as a co-chair for the upcoming ISIC Skin Image Analysis workshop at CVPR, and guest editor for upcoming special issues on skin image analysis.
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Dr. Eric Teasley
Technical Program Manager
Dr. Eric Teasley is a technical program manager who plays roles on the mobile vitals and health equity teams at Google Health. Eric developed the mobile vitals team’s first platform for collecting synchronized video and ground truth vital sign data and conducted the pilot study behind the team’s technologies for measuring heart rate and breathing rate via smartphone camera as features of the Google Fit app. His experience in ensuring that these technologies were developed with diversity in mind led to a role in developing processes for ensuring equity in research across Google Health. Prior to Google, Eric completed an MD and an MS in bioengineering at Stanford, where he used microfluidics to enable novel methods of growth factor delivery for tissue engineering applications and created tools for capturing and observing individual cells. He additionally holds a BS in chemical engineering from Stanford.
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Dr. Sunny Jansen
Technical Program Manager
Dr. Jansen's work as a Technical Program Manager focuses on oncology, medical imaging and machine learning, and translating Google’s foundational research into real-world patient impact. Before joining Google, she was at Verily Life Sciences where she led regulatory strategy and clinical development of machine-learning technology spanning diverse disease indications. She also worked at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a lead review scientist of breast cancer detection and diagnosis technologies, and at the National Cancer Institute doing research in breast cancer genetics. Dr. Jansen received her PhD in Medical Physics from the University of Chicago.
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Dr. Chris Kelly
Clinician Scientist
Dr. Christopher Kelly is a clinician scientist working in Google Health’s artificial intelligence imaging and diagnostics team. He focuses on the safe translation of Google’s groundbreaking artificial intelligence research into real clinical impact. Prior to joining Google, he completed a PhD in medical imaging at King’s College London. As a clinician, he created an award-winning smartphone app called NeoMate, used worldwide to support doctors and nurses looking after sick newborn infants. He continues to practise as a paediatrician on the neonatal intensive care unit at St Thomas’ Hospital, London. Alongside medicine, Chris previously founded and sold two internet companies and is an active angel investor in technology startups.
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Careers at Google Health
The Google Health team combines technological expertise with clinical best practices and patient-first principles — offering a great opportunity for anyone interested in and passionate about healthcare. Want to join our team?