Author Talk with Charlotte Blease
Speaker: Charlotte Blease, PhD, Health Informaticist and Associate Professor at Uppsala University
Join Dr. Ken Mandl, Director of the Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP) at Boston Children’s Hospital, for a conversation with Dr. Charlotte Blease — philosopher, Associate Professor at Uppsala University, and former Harvard Medical School researcher — on her acclaimed book Dr. Bot: Why Doctors Can Fail Us—and How AI Could Save Lives.
Modern medicine is extraordinary, and doctors' represent the acme of human expertise, yet patients are still let down by bias, error, and burnout. Drawing on nearly two decades of research, Blease asks an uncomfortable question: what if machines could be more humane than the doctors treating us? This talk examines where human care breaks down — and whether AI could make medicine safer, more effective, and more humane than it has ever been.
Dr. Charlotte Blease, originally from Belfast, is a health informaticist and Associate Professor at Uppsala University, Sweden, and a Research Affiliate in Digital Psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School. A philosopher by training (PhD in philosophy of science and mind, 2008), she has spent nearly two decades in health research, with 200 publications and academic posts across the US, Europe, and the UK — including five years at Harvard Medical School. In 2026 she was Visiting Professor in Primary Care at the University of Melbourne.
Her acclaimed book Dr Bot: Why Doctors Can Fail Us and How AI Could Save Lives (Yale University Press, 2025) asks an uncomfortable question: what if machines could be more humane than the doctors treating us? Reviewed by CNN, The Lancet, and The Washington Post, and endorsed by the Prime Minister of Ireland, it makes the bold case that AI could fix what medicine keeps getting wrong. She is also co-author of The Nocebo Effect: When Words Make You Sick (Mayo Clinic Press, 2024).
