Dani Kiyasseh

Home base

I have been operating at the intersection of AI and healthcare for the past 8 years.

My recent focus has been on building large-scale vision-based foundation models to better understand surgery. We have already started this mission at Halsted AI, a Techstars-backed company that I founded in 2025.

I completed my postdoctoral fellowship at Caltech, developing AI systems to track the activity of surgeons from videos which culminated in a publication featured on the front cover of Nature Biomedical Engineering. Before that, I received my PhD degree from the University of Oxford where I developed deep learning models to explicitly deal with limited labeled clinical data. My thesis can be accessed here. I graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a Bachelor's degree in biomedical engineering.

I was fortunate to be named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 and the MIT "Innovators Under 35" in the MENA region, and to be selected as a "Rising Star in Engineering in Health" by Columbia, Cornell, and Johns Hopkins. My research has been published in top machine learning conferences including ICML and NeurIPS and in high-impact scientific journals such as Nature Biomedical Engineering and Nature Communications. I have also had the privilege to conduct AI research alongside colleagues and mentors at Ford Motor Company, the Mayo Clinic, Merck & Co., Flatiron Health, and Vicarious Surgical.