The science of making do: Extreme decision-making in extreme environments
Mary-Anne "Annie" Hartley leads the Laboratory of Intelligent Global Health Technologies (LiGHT) based at Yale School of Medicine (BIDS), with a satellite presence in Switzerland (EPFL School of Computer Science) and Rwanda (CMU-Africa, School of Engineering). Her team works with humanitarian response organizations like Doctors Without Borders and the International Committee of the Red Cross to develop implementable AI-powered technology to understand and guide extreme decision-making in extreme and resource-limited settings.
Methods
Topics
Biography
Growing up in South Africa's deeply inequitable and resource-limited setting, Mary-Anne "Annie" Hartley is passionate about "making do" at the edge. She obtained her undergraduate degrees at the Universities of Pretoria and Cape Town and then completed a PhD and MD in Switzerland with a Master in Public Health at LSHTM. She has worked extensively in low-resource and humanitarian settings, including a deployment in Sierra Leone during the West African Ebola epidemic, where she formalized her interest in extreme decision-making. Her research group (LiGHT: Laboratory of Intelligent Global Health Technologies) was established in 2023 and aims to create technologies that assist high-stakes decision-making in humanitarian response and low-resource settings. Annie is passionate about Africa's potential (running an academic exchange program between Africa-based institutes and Yale), is a lover of African street dogs (two of her own, Barnacle and Grunt, can be spotted resenting squirrels in Wooster Square), and continues to work clinically in a volunteer capacity in Southern and West Africa.