Frida Polli, a neuroscientist, entrepreneur, investor, and inventor known for her cutting-edge contributions at the intersection of behavioral science and artificial intelligence, is MIT’s new Visiting Innovation Scholar for the 2024-25 academic year. She is the first visiting innovation scholar to hold a position at the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.
Polli began her career in academic neuroscience, focusing on multimodal brain imaging relevant to health and disease. She was a researcher in the Psychiatric Neuroimaging Group at Mass General Brigham and Harvard Medical School. She then joined MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences as a postdoctoral fellow, working with John Gabrieli, the Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and professor of brain and cognitive sciences.
Her research has received many awards, including the Young Investigator Award from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation. She has authored more than 30 peer-reviewed articles. Publications of the National Academy of Sciences, Neuroscience Journaland brain. She transitioned from academia to entrepreneur by completing her MBA at Harvard Business School (HBS) where she was a Robert Kaplan Life Science Fellow. During this time, she was a member of Aukera Therapeutics, which won the Life Sciences Track and the Audience Choice Award at the 2010 MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition.
After HBS, Polli launched pymetrics, which leverages advances in cognitive science and machine learning to develop analytics-driven decision-making and performance improvement software for the human capital sector. She holds several patents for technology developed at Pymetrics, which she co-founded in 2012 and served as CEO until her successful departure in 2022. Pymetrics is a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer and Inc. It was a global innovator, the fastest growing company on the 5000 list. Forbes Artificial Intelligence Top 50 Companies. Polli and pymetrics also played a pivotal role in passing New York’s Automated Employment Decision Tool law, the first algorithmic bias law in the United States, which takes effect in July 2023.
Returning to MIT as a visiting innovation scholar, Polli is working closely with Sendhil Mullainathan, the Peter de Florez Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Economics and a senior fellow in the Information and Decision Systems Laboratory. Together with Mullainathan, she brings together a broad group of faculty, students, and postdocs from across MIT to solve specific problems at the intersection of humans and algorithms, develop new subdomains of computer science specializing in behavioral science, and work to educate the next generation. I’m doing it. This is the number of bilingual scientists in these two fields.
“Sometimes you get lucky, and sometimes you get ridiculously lucky. Frida has achieved success in each of the areas we seek to influence: academia, civil society, and the marketplace. She is able to combine an entrepreneurial spirit with an ongoing focus on positive social impact while ensuring the intellectual rigor that MIT requires. This is a very rare combination, and one we are ridiculously lucky to have,” says Mullainathan.
“People are increasingly interacting with algorithms, often with poor results, because most algorithms were not built with human interaction in mind,” Polli says. “We will focus on designing algorithms that work in synergy with people. Only such algorithms can help solve large-scale social problems such as education, healthcare, and poverty.”
Polli has been recognized as one of the following: Inc.’s Selected as one of the top 100 female entrepreneurs in 2019 entrepreneurial Added to the Top 100 Powerful Women of 2020 and 100 Outstanding Women in AI Ethics of 2024 lists. Her work has been highlighted in major media outlets including: new york times, wall street journal, financial times, economist, luck, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, bloombergand Inc.
In addition to her role at pymetrics, she founded Alethia AI, an organization focused on promoting transparency in technology, in 2023, and Rosalind Ventures, dedicated to investing in female founders in science and healthcare, in 2024. She is also an advisor to the Buck Institute’s Center for Women’s Healthy Aging.
“We welcome Dr. Polli back to MIT. As a bilingual expert in behavioral science and AI, she is a great fit for the University. Her entrepreneurial background makes her an excellent first visiting innovation scholar,” said Dan Huttenlocher. says: , dean of MIT’s Schwarzman School of Computing and the Henry Ellis Warren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
