Altering genetic code is something any sci-fi loving kid has thought about: You can't have Spiderman or X-Men without genetic engineering.
For Bradley Malin-Accenture Professor of Biomedical Informatics and professor of biostatistics, computer science, and electrical and computer engineering-these mutant superheroes, discovered in his dad's comic book shop, opened the door to a fascination with genetics and a transforming career.
It was Dolly the sheep, the first-ever mammal born through genetic cloning, who became Malin's bellwether for the urgent need to study privacy issues around healthcare.
This is where Malin's career as a geneticist started to morph.
"At the time in the late 1990s, the frontier of healthcare privacy concerns revolved around genetics: My genome could communicate all these things about me, and I should have privacy over my genome," Malin said. "But what if someone takes my cells?"
That was a red flag for Malin, and it pushed him to study public policy.
SAFE COMPUTER SCIENCE
As Dolly and the initial hysteria around her went out to pasture, in came companies at the periphery of healthcare. They sold at-home genetic testing and gene-focused "family tree" information, and people willingly mailed away their genetic code-with little regulation.
Fast forward toward the explosion of the internet and the beginning of social media, with people sharing lots of information, including details about their health. Malin's expertise evolved toward computer science by creating safe online medical record systems to help patients and providers, while keeping a keen eye on rapidly evolving machine learning.
Then he took the quantum leap forward to his current work with artificial intelligence, developing technologies to enable AI to work safely within organizational, political and health information architectures.
"I started as a molecular biologist, a geneticist. Then I went to public policy and management because I was very interested in how information is regulated, controlled and shared. Simultaneously, I was doing a master's in machine learning," he said. "I'm also always studying history and how society evolved due to decisions that were made at that time."
PREPARED FOR THIS MOMENT
Though Malin couldn't predict the AI security maelstrom of today, his educational trajectory and research formed the optimal foundation for ever-evolving AI healthcare privacy work.
"Technology tends to run at a pace faster than policy and law," Malin said. "It's an age-old problem that will always be morphing, which is why our work is important."
He warns of chatbots trained to make a person feel like they're connecting with a real provider, without being required to follow the health information privacy HIPAA protections required of human providers.
The need for Malin's expertise during this tech revolution opened a floodgate of opportunities, including co-founding and co-leading the Health Data Science Center, the AI Discovery and Vigilance to Accelerate Innovation and Clinical Excellence (ADVANCE) Center, the Center for Genetic Privacy and Identity in Community Settings (GetPreCiSe) and the Ethical and Trustworthy AI Core of the NIH's Bridge to Artificial Intelligence program. Malin is a fellow in the prestigious National Academy of Medicine, and most recently he became a 2025 fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Malin spends a lot of time in Washington, D.C., collaborating with experts and educating lawmakers.
"I had a mentor who stressed it is the responsibility of every scientist and engineer to lend their expertise to policymakers because otherwise, we'll have uninformed policy," he said.
BALANCING INNOVATION AND PRIVACY
Malin is enthusiastic about AI innovations in the hands of doctors and nurses, including more advanced electronic medical records where providers work in partnership with AI models to better examine a patient's symptoms and history.
"My team is constantly asking, 'Is this technology fit for a purpose that will help patients and their caregivers? '" he said. "Moreover, you have to respect that data comes from people, and data is going to be used to build systems used by and for people."
TECH MUST UNDERSTAND DOCTOR/PATIENT EXPERIENCE
He stresses to his students the need to stay embedded within medical environments to build understanding and empathy.
"Building the AI is the easy part. Ensuring that the AI understands what the doctor and patient are experiencing and anticipating their needs is where the time and energy need to be spent," he said.
IDEAL ENVIRONMENT
Malin credits Vanderbilt and its mission of collaboration for catapulting his ability to make a difference.
"At Vanderbilt, you have some of the word's brightest minds in different disciplines literally out your door. You just have to talk to them to get a collaboration started," he said. "The bounty of support from the administration and colleagues across the university took my work and supercharged it."
He's especially excited about working with the new College of Connected Computing and its potential for collaboration with the School of Medicine.
"I don't think anybody's ever seen anything like this, where you have a tech backbone to support just about everything that anybody is going to do across science, medicine and beyond," he said.
NEXT GENERATION
Malin is collaborating, researching and training the next generation to advance tech in health, while also protecting privacy.
"I tell my students to solve problems. As a result, they're going out to the technology companies with some of the largest reach-Google and Meta and Amazon-and taking privacy principles learned here at Vanderbilt and putting them into practice in industry, where the technology is coming from now," he said.
"Innovation and privacy will keep changing, so we need to keep working to make an impact on the world."
