2026 AI For Pediatric Health Symposium Schedule

All events in the Building Auditorium unless otherwise noted

8 a.m. Coffee

8:30 a.m. Introduction and Overview: Marius Linguraru, Children’s National Hospital; Naren Ramakrishnan, Virginia Tech

8:45 a.m. Welcome Remarks: Michael Friedlander, Virginia Tech; Catherine Bollard, Children's National Hospital

9 a.m.: Session Moderator: Marius Linguraru, Children’s National Hospital

9:05 a.m.: Keynote: Rod Tarrago, CMIO for Pediatrics, Amazon AWS, AI in Healthcare: Is Good Enough No Longer Good Enough?

9:50 a.m.: Kirk Roberts, UTHealth Houston: The Value of Clinical Notes for Early Diagnosis of Inborn Errors of Immunity: Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Large Language Models (LLMs)

10:25 a.m.: Daphne Yao, Virginia Tech: Enhancing the Trustworthiness of AI Machine Learning Models in Clinical Prediction Tasks

10:50: a.m.: Chris Gable, Children's National Hospital: Pediatric Mental Health and the AI Safety Imperative

11:15 a.m.: Anita Patel, Children’s National Hospital: Machine Learning Approaches for Automated Withdrawal Detection and Prediction in the Pediatric ICU

11:40 a.m.: Lance Collins, Virginia Tech Vice-president for the Greater Washington, D.C., Area: Welcome to the Virginia Tech Institute for Advanced Computing

11:50 a.m to 1 p.m.: Lunch

1 p.m.: Session Moderator: Sally Allain, Virginia Tech

1:05 p.m.: Erika Kim, ARPA-H Resilient Systems Program Manager, ARPA-H Pediatric Care eXpansion: From Binders to Breakthroughs

1:40 p.m.: Nick Rider, Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine: Scaling an AI Pipeline for Rare Disease Diagnosis at the National Level

2:05 p.m.: Syed Anwar, Children's National Hospital: Mapping Seizure Networks using Multimodal AI

2:30 p.m.: Matt Weston, Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC: Large-Scale Neural Network Dynamics in Mouse Models of Developmental Epileptic Encephalopathies

2:55 p.m.: Short Coffee Break

3:15 p.m.: Session Moderator: Sarah Clinton, Virginia Tech

3:20 p.m.: Ananth Anapragada, Texas Children's Hospital: AI-driven Analytics: Imaging, Radiomics, and Everything Else

3:55 p.m.: Paul Sands, Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC: Combining Wearable Magnetoencephalography and Machine Learning for Studying Naturalistic Parent-Infant Interactions

4:20 p.m.: Stephen LaConte, Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC: From Words to Worlds: AI-Personalized Cognitive Stimuli for Health Research

4:45 p.m.: Austin Tapp and Krithka Iyer, Children's National Hospital: AI-Enhanced Portable Pediatric MRI: From Scalable Brain Imaging to Global Developmental Outcomes

5:10 p.m.: Launch of the CNH-VT Pediatric Health AI Center of Excellence: Marius Linguaru, Children's National Hospital and Naren Ramakrishnan, Virginia Tech

5:15 p.m.: Networking event, 8th Floor, in the Treehouse