Testimonials

I first encountered Heather through her graduate studies, where her groundbreaking work demonstrated new capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) to reveal molecular driver lesions in cancer from routine H&E-stained tissue pathology slides. Since then, through social media she has become a key interpreter and highly vocal advocate for an exploding field of research that aims to dramatically impact the practice of pathology as we have known it for well over a century. As a computer scientist, her combination of experience with AI algorithms and wide domain knowledge is poised to make pivotal contributions to, among many fields, the emerging field of computational pathology.

Our team was fortunate to work with Heather on a short-term project, where she was a critical contributor to establishing a framework for future studies. She has an unusual ability to demystify, in plain language, new developments in computer science for a wide audience, and I am confident through her work she will influence many teams and help bring to reality the next set of tools to transform pathology.

Keith Wharton, Ultivue, VP Medical Director

At CytoVeris, our mission is to use artificial intelligence to power our multi-spectral imaging platform to detect cancer intraoperatively in real-time. Working with Heather and Pixel Scientia Labs was a great choice for us because of her extensive experience in cancer detection, imaging, and machine learning. Based on this background and expertise, she was able to support the team as we worked to empower our imaging solutions through AI and machine learning.

Heather interacts closely with our team and helps enormously in guiding our efforts toward the machine learning architectures that perform best for our system. Her deep understanding of the diverse range of ML architectures and capabilities allows us focus on the data preprocessing, data augmentation, and validation techniques that produce the most robust results given our unique data and challenges.

Alan Kersey, CytoVeris, President & CEO

Heather’s deep specialized knowledge of computer vision played a critical role in getting a team that was frankly very new at both ML and remote sensing focused on the remote sensing component.

What I value most is Heather’s deep critical thinking. The more I work in ML, the more I keep finding that deep and structured critical thinking about what we are modeling and how it all fits together consistently outperforms specialized technical knowledge over time.

It’s clear to me Heather thinks like a scientist who is equipped with deep ML skills and a bit of software engineering, not like a software engineer who has deep ML skills and a bit of science. And I can’t emphasize enough how much more valuable that is to a deep tech startup.

Gavin McCormick, WattTime, Co-founder and Executive Director

Heather helped us navigate through aspects of ML that were previously unfamiliar to us. She acted as a senior guide of our young ML engineers and drove us on the right path for ML techniques. Her leadership provided validation to our team, giving them confidence that they were doing things right and did not fumble through the intricacies of ML techniques.

One of the most pronounced benefits of working with Heather was the upskilling of our team. With her help, we could refine and streamline our model development and validation processes. As we began incorporating Heather’s insights and methodologies into our projects, we also became more confident that we would reach our goal. The expertise she brought to the table instilled greater trust in our outputs, making it easier to secure buy-ins and pave the way for future collaborations.

I would absolutely, wholeheartedly recommend Heather’s ML consulting services. The reasons are multifold:

  • Heather’s specialization in digital pathology, combined with a broad understanding of ML techniques, ensured that the solutions provided were both cutting-edge and relevant. This blend is rare and was pivotal in our project’s success.
  • Heather also possesses the unique ability to translate complex ML concepts into actionable steps for our team. This pragmatic approach ensured that we didn’t just understand the theory, but could also apply it effectively in real-world scenarios.
  • Throughout our collaboration, Heather’s dedication to ensuring the best possible outcomes was evident. From staying updated with the latest in the field to ensuring our models were unbiased and insightful, she consistently went the extra mile.
  • While Heather’s expertise is unparalleled, her willingness to collaborate and understand our unique challenges made the engagement truly productive. She integrated seamlessly with our team, fostering a synergistic environment that was both educational and innovative.

Given these attributes and the tangible results we’ve seen, I believe any organization aiming to harness the potential of ML, especially in digital pathology, would greatly benefit from Heather’s consulting services.

Cristian Mogodici, Zaya AI, CEO and Co-founder

Heather came recommended by another colleague, and her background was orthogonal to the computer vision work we were planning. However, she brought a fresh perspective and alternative approaches that accelerated our development.

Heather provides very contemporary academic alternatives that challenge existing approaches. We may land on the existing approach, but we have done so with a better understanding of the alternatives. The roadmap model is also beneficial in predicting the full scope of an approach, and it forms a good starting point for our project plans.

Heather has accelerated the development of our machine learning projects by challenging the status quo and introducing the team to new approaches. She helped us get out of the echo chamber and brought an outside perspective with very relevant alternative approaches that would have taken a lot longer to do on our own.

Joe Sturonas, Ancera, VP of Systems Development

My only hesitation about working with Heather was the cost. When we started working with her, we found that she is very knowledgeable, efficient, and professional. It was very easy to communicate with her, set up calls, and get clear, valuable input. Heather provided guidance to less experienced team members and gave confidence to our team and investors. We hope to work with Heather again in the future and would highly recommend her ML consulting services to others.

Gabriel Sanchez, Enspectra Health, Co-founder and CEO

Heather’s knowledge of the current state of the art within the digital pathology field is second to none. Consultation on best practice approaches for deep learning model classification performance and insight into digital research perspectives were very beneficial. Discussions of prior art enabled our team to focus on novel research and refine our current AI methodologies for clinical research.

Jenny Fitzgerald, Deciphex, Director of Clinical Research & Operations

Pixel Scientia provides valuable insights for Gestalt’s image analysis product development. Heather has deep understanding of digital pathology and machine learning and their application to whole slide images. Her in-depth review of the current state of the art research has enabled Gestalt to rapidly focus our machine learning efforts on approaches that are yielding value for our pathologists and their patients.

Brian Napora, Gestalt Diagnostics, VP of Sales & Product Management

We chose to work with Heather due to her extensive experience using deep learning algorithms for medical image analysis. Her prior work with digital pathology gave us the confidence that she would be a good fit for our project.

Heather was very well-organized and open about reporting the project progress to us. The roadmap we worked on together is very well written with clear descriptions regarding the tasks we wanted to tackle, the algorithms that could be applied to each one of the tasks, and the data/annotation requirements.

Ebrahim Hazrati, Agendia, Senior Deep Learning Engineer

Heather provided excellent consulting on our clinical AI research. She offered a wealth of knowledge in this domain and introduced us to new techniques to combat the failure modes that we presented. She helped to distill the latest machine learning literature relevant to our queries, and pointed us towards the most applicable and successful methods. Heather provided practical feedback and guidance, which allowed us to quickly take steps in the right direction and improve the performance of our models. These consultation sessions were very effective and I would be delighted to work with Heather again.

Darragh Maguire, Deciphex, Artificial Intelligence Engineer