Biotech company Moderna, now a household name thanks to its COVID-19 vaccine, recently established its own Artificial Intelligence Academy as part of a collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University. The initiative will give Moderna employees at all levels the education and empowerment necessary to identify and integrate machine learning and AI solutions into the company's systems and processes. The AI Academy is currently launching with its first batch of students; full rollout is slated for early 2022.
Stéphane Bancel, Chief Executive Officer of Moderna, said, “Moderna is advancing mRNA medicines at a breadth, speed, and scale that is uncommon in the biopharmaceutical industry, and we attribute this speed in part to the incorporation of digital technologies in our company. As we look at the next 10 to 20 years, we believe that we have to learn as fast as we can to maximize the impact of mRNA technologies to patients and scale our company in a very different way than large companies have scaled in the last decades."
CMU's Tepper School of Business and Department of Statistics & Data Science, as well as many of its professors, have been integral in designing and delivering Moderna's AI Academy. The program itself contains a custom-made curriculum covering topics like data quality and data visualization, statistical thinking and models, and machine learning algorithms and AI ethics, offering a breadth of material to drive strategic thinking about leveraging AI. Moderna staff will be linked with CMU staff in person and online via the Integrated Statistics Learning Environment (ISLE), an interactive educational platform that originated at the university.
