Frida Polli, a neuroscientist, entrepreneur, investor, and inventor known for her cutting-edge contributions at the crossroads of behavioral sciences and artificial intelligence, is MIT's new visiting innovation scholar for the 2024-25 academic year. She is the first visiting innovation researcher housed at the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.
Polli began his career in academic neuroscience focusing on multimodal brain imaging related to health and disease. He was a member of the Psychiatric Neuroimaging Group at Mass General Brigham and Harvard Medical School. He then joined MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences as a postdoc, where he worked with John Gabrieli, Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and technology and professor of brain and cognitive sciences.
His research has won numerous awards, including the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation Young Investigator Award. She is the author of more than 30 peer-reviewed articles, with notable publications in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Scienceshe Neuroscience Magazineand Brain. She transitioned from academia to entrepreneurship by completing her MBA at Harvard Business School (HBS) as a Robert Kaplan Life Sciences Scholar. During this time, he also won the Life Sciences major and the Audience Choice Award in the 2010 MIT $100,000 Entrepreneurship Competition as a member of Aukera Therapeutics.
After HBS, Polli launched pymetrics, which leveraged advances in cognitive science and machine learning to develop analytics-based decision-making and performance improvement software for the human capital sector. She holds multiple patents for technology developed at pymetrics, which she co-founded in 2012 and led as CEO until her successful exit in 2022. Pymetrics was a technology pioneer and global innovator of the World Economic Forum, one of Inc.'s fastest-growing companies. 5000, and the company Forbes artificial intelligence 50. Polli and pymetrics also played a critical role in the passage of the country's first algorithmic bias law, the Decision Tools Act New York's automated employment policy, which went into effect in July 2023.
Returning to MIT as a visiting innovation researcher, Polli collaborates closely with Sendhil Mullainathan, Peter de Florez Professor in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Economics, and principal investigator in the Information and Decision Systems Laboratory. With Mullainathan, he is working to bring together a wide range of faculty, students, and postdocs across MIT to address concrete problems where humans and algorithms intersectto develop a new subdomain of computer science specific to the behavioral sciences and train the next generation of scientists to be bilingual in these two fields.
“Sometimes you are lucky and other times you are irrational lucky. Frida has thrived in each of the facets in which we seek to have an impact: academia, civil society and the market. It combines a startup mentality with an abiding interest in positive social impact, while also being able to ensure the kind of intellectual rigor that MIT demands. It is an exceptionally rare combination and we are very lucky to have it,” says Mullainathan.
“People are increasingly interacting with algorithms, often with poor results, because most algorithms are not built with human interaction in mind,” Polli says. “We will focus on designing algorithms that work synergistically with people. “Only these algorithms can help us address big social challenges in education, healthcare, poverty, etc.”
Polli was recognized as one of Inc. Top 100 Women Founders in 2019, followed by being named to of the entrepreneur The 100 Most Powerful Women of 2020 and the 2024 list of the 100 Brilliant Women in ai Ethics. His work has been featured by major media outlets, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, financial time, The economist, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, fast company, Bloombergand Inc.
Beyond her role at pymetrics, she founded Alethia ai in 2023, an organization focused on promoting transparency in technology, and in 2024 launched Rosalind Ventures, dedicated to investing in female founders in science and healthcare. She is also an advisor to the Buck Institute's Center for Healthy Aging in Women.
“I am delighted to welcome Dr. Polli back to MIT. As a bilingual expert in behavioral sciences and artificial intelligence, she is an ideal fit for the university. Her business experience makes her an excellent inaugural visiting researcher in innovation,” says Dan Huttenlocher. , dean of the MIT Schwarzman School of Computing and Henry Ellis Warren Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
