Accelerating healthcare breakthroughs through privacy-preserving AI

For UW Tacoma Professor Martine De Cock, Ph.D., her work with privacy-preserving artificial intelligence (AI) is more than a research focus. It’s a personal commitment to breaking down the silos that often hinder rare disease research and to preparing the next generation of researchers to use these rapidly advancing technologies responsibly.

De Cock’s work centers on applying privacy-preserving AI in healthcare settings, enabling researchers to analyze sensitive medical data safely. This approach makes new treatments and discoveries possible while protecting patient privacy.

Working alongside a team of students and postdoctoral researchers and in partnership with Seattle-based biotechnology nonprofit Sage Bionetworks, De Cock develops AI tools that allow data from multiple sources to be used collaboratively without exposing private information.

A key area of this work involves synthetic data — realistic, computer-generated patient data that can be shared safely for research purposes. The team produces this data at different privacy levels and shares it in tiers. Higher-quality data is available to qualified researchers, while less precise synthetic data can be shared more broadly with approved users.

With early support from UW Tacoma’s Founders Endowment Award and continued funding from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR), the project aims to accelerate healthcare breakthroughs through secure data sharing while providing student researchers with hands-on experience using AI tools for the greater good.

Read more about Martine De Cock and her research team’s work on the NAIRR Pilot website.