Date: March 23, 2026
Time: 05:30 PM
Venue: Lecture Hall 1003, Block 7, IISER Berhampur
Flyer Link: Click here to view
‘Is AI the New Language of Biomedicine?’
Demis Hassabis has described artificial intelligence as poised to become the most transformative tool in the history of science — a claim that biomedicine is beginning to test in earnest. From AlphaFold's rewriting of structural biology to large language models navigating clinical reasoning, AI is increasingly fluent in the grammar of biological systems: sequences, images, signals, and outcomes. Yet fluency is not understanding, and translation is not transformation. Drawing on evidence from experimental biology and controlled trials across six clinical domains — screening, triage, workflow optimisation, clinical decision support, diagnostic augmentation, and communication — we show that AI's measurable impact occurs where its capabilities align with structured institutional workflows, not where its technical performance is celebrated. In this talk, I will share lessons from the front lines of AI-enabled biomedicine about how to use it effectively and ethically, and how to accelerate its progress.
Prof. Anurag Agrawal - Professor Anurag Agrawal is Dean, BioSciences and Health Research, Trivedi School of Biosciences, Ashoka University, India, and former director of the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, a national laboratory of CSIR, India. After completing graduate medical education at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi, he further trained in Internal Medicine, Pulmonary Disease and Critical Care at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, USA, followed by a PhD in Physiology from Delhi University. His primary research is in respiratory biology and broader interests are in a new vision of health and healthcare seen through the lenses of emerging technologies. He received the Shanti Swaroop Bhatnagar Prize in 2014, the Sun Pharma Foundation award in 2020, and is a fellow of the Indian national science academies. He is also a recipient of the senior fellowship of the Wellcome Trust DBT India Alliance.
During the COVID19 pandemic, Dr. Anurag led discovery of the Delta variant, co-chaired the WHO Technical Advisory Group for SARS-CoV-2 viral evolution, and contributed to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' pathogens project. He serves on numerous national and global advisory groups, most recently chairing the World Health Organization technical advisory group for viral evolution.
