Zeshan M. Hussain

I am an internal medicine resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an MD–PhD graduate of the Harvard–MIT Health Sciences and Technology (HST) program. My PhD was completed in the Clinical ML group at MIT, advised by David Sontag.

My research develops machine learning methods at the intersection of representation learning, causal inference, and physician–AI interaction, with a primary clinical focus in oncology. Current directions include improving sample efficiency for LLM-based clinical prediction, integrating real-world evidence with experimental data for reliable causal effect estimation, and studying how physicians interact with AI-based recommendations in practice.

Previously, I completed my B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University, where I worked on deep learning for medical imaging and data augmentation with Daniel Rubin and Chris Ré.

Research

My work focuses on building ML methods that are both statistically rigorous and clinically deployable, with precision oncology as the primary application. I have pursued research along three themes:

• How will my patient respond holistically to a chosen therapeutic regimen? Oncologists approach treatment selection multifactorially — maximizing survival, minimizing adverse events, improving quality of life. I have built predictive models of longitudinal patient trajectories that provide multitask predictions to support this kind of holistic management [npj Digital Medicine, 2024]. A key bottleneck is labeled data scarcity; more recently I have studied how large language models can construct powerful clinical representations to dramatically improve sample efficiency for downstream prediction tasks [arXiv, 2026].

• How can I trust the causal and predictive estimates my model produces? Observational data is pervasive in oncology, but estimates derived from it are unreliable without validation. I have developed falsification methods that use experimental data to detect and characterize bias in observational studies [NeurIPS 2022] [AISTATS 2023] [ICML 2026], and uncertainty quantification methods that produce valid confidence intervals for ML model predictions [AISTATS 2023].

• How will AI-based decision support change how physicians make decisions? Deploying AI in the clinic requires understanding how physicians actually use model outputs. I built a prototype clinical decision support system for oncology and ran user studies examining how AI recommendations shape physician decision-making [ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare, 2026].