Amy Abernethy is the former Principal Deputy Commissioner of the FDA and former Chief Medical Officer of Verily (part of Alphabet/Google).  After her first job as a teenager as an ice cream scooper and “balloon girl” on Main Street at Disney World in Orlando, her career got its rocket boost at age 16 when she coded expert planning automation models for NASA (aka first-generation AI) in a back office of Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral as published in the Center’s 1985 Annual R&D report.

Ever since, Amy has driven forward a vision of applying the power of data to make medical research and care more patient-centric, effective, and efficient. As a hematologist, oncologist, palliative medicine physician, and Professor of Medicine at Duke, she ran the Center for Learning Health Care in the Duke Clinical Research Institute and the Cancer Care Research Program in the Duke Cancer Institute; at Flatiron Health as CSO and CMO she drove the strategy to use massive regulatory-grade datasets to optimize clinical research and patient care; at the FDA, as Principal Deputy Commissioner and acting CIO she led a policy vision focused on personalized medicine and accelerating clinical evidence generation; and at Verily as President of Product and CMO she applied Alphabet’s technology, data and AI power to healthcare and the life sciences.

Amy has laid out her mission to incorporate the right data sources and leading-edge computation including AI, to advance the future of cancer care and health, at Harvard Medical School, in Nature, and in over 500 other publications.

When she is not fishing for the right medical data, she is out looking for real fish offshore with her husband Steve in the Florida Keys, Belize, or in Australia, where both of their kids were born.  She likes to read, work, travel and love on her family – “in reverse order.”

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