Students Help Launch AI in Health Care Conference
The inaugural Emerging Interdisciplinary Leaders in Healthcare: AI Conference brought students and professionals from academia and industry to Cal Poly in March for two days of learning and discussion about the role of artificial intelligence in healthcare.
As a project for IME 424: Industrial Engineering in Healthcare during winter quarter 2026, students played a central role in organizing the conference and recruiting speakers for its focus areas. The work put Cal Poly’s Learn by Doing philosophy into practice, giving students experience creating an interdisciplinary event around emerging issues in engineering and healthcare.
Jill Speece, assistant professor of industrial and manufacturing engineering at Cal Poly and a recipient of the College of Engineering Change Agent Award, helped create the conference.
She worked with Di Lacey, senior executive at Western University of Health Sciences, and Jamie L. Fairclough, director and faculty member in engineering and medicine at Dartmouth College. Together, they envisioned an event that would connect engineering students with medical and premedical students, AI experts, healthcare providers and industry leaders.
Attendees could choose from more than 30 talks during the two-day event. Topics included large language models, machine learning, visual and perceptual AI, systems thinking and risk governance. Speakers and participants came from Florida, Texas, Washington and Michigan. One student traveled from Romania to present.
Support from TurboRad, Radiology Associates, Geoff Austin and the Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering Department helped make the event possible.
Organizers plan to build on the inaugural event by creating a community of future healthcare leaders. The conference is designed to bring people across disciplines together to learn from experts and one another while examining how AI affects healthcare operations and raises ethical questions.
The next Emerging Interdisciplinary Leaders in Healthcare: AI Conference is scheduled for April 2027. Those interested in participating in or supporting the event can contact Speece for more information.
