Laura Sikstrom

Dr. Laura Sikstrom is a medical anthropologist (PhD, University of Toronto) and Scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) within the Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics where she co-leads the Predictive Care Lab, an interdisciplinary research team exploring the interplay between AI, health service delivery and social justice (https://predictivecarecollab.com/). Her research focuses on the rise of ‘Fair-AI’ in the computer sciences and the range of sociotechnical solutions imagined to ‘de-bias’ algorithms and their outputs.  Dr. Sikstrom draws on ethnographic insights to explore how data is transformed into clinically relevant predictions and decision-making tools, with a focus on promoting compassionate and equitable care. Dr. Sikstrom is also leading a major research project (SSHRC IG) on “human-AI teaming,” which explores the limits to combining human expertise with machine learning to enhance decision-making and patient care.

 Beyond this, Dr. Sikstrom leads initiatives designed to responsibly integrate sociodemographic data to support fair AI applications in mental health and collaborates on digital health projects globally. Working alongside clinicians and computational scientists within a learning health system, she also develops tutorials and workshops designed to embed social science theories and approaches into computing pipelines (https://fairlearn.org/v0.11/auto_examples/plot_intersectional_bias.html). 

Dr. Sikstrom’s contributions have earned her multiple awards, including a Killam Fellowship, a CIHR Health System Impact Fellowship, an AMS Fellowship in Compassion and AI, and a nomination for the Governor General’s Gold Award, the highest academic honor at the graduate level in Canada. She is also the sole Canadian recipient of Google’s Award for Inclusion Research for her work on bias and risk prediction algorithms.

Dr. Sikstrom is currently accepting graduate students in human-computer interactions, science and technology studies, global health, and psychiatry.