Me, Myself, and AI AI and the COVID-19 Vaccine: Moderna’s Dave Johnson
"We tend not to be a company of half measures,” notes Dave Johnson, chief data and artificial intelligence officer at Moderna, “so when we decide we’re going to do something, we’re going to do it.” This characterization certainly seems to fit the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotech company that made a name for itself in 2020 upon releasing one of the first COVID-19 vaccines approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for emergency use to combat the coronavirus.
In this bonus episode, Sam and Shervin learn how Moderna used artificial intelligence to speed up development of the vaccine and how the technology has helped to automate other key systems and processes to build efficiencies across the organization. Dave also describes Moderna’s digital-first culture and offers insights around collaboration that can be applied across industries. Read the episode transcript here.
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Me, Myself, and AI is a collaborative podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group and is hosted by Sam Ransbotham and Shervin Khodabandeh. Our engineer is David Lishansky, and the coordinating producers are Allison Ryder and Sophie Rüdinger.
Guest bio:
Dave Johnson is chief data and artificial intelligence officer at Moderna, where he is responsible for all enterprise data capabilities, including data engineering, data integration, data science, and software engineering. Johnson earned a doctorate in information physics and has more than 15 years of experience in software engineering and data science. He has spent more than a decade working exclusively in enterprise pharma and biotech companies.
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