Andrew Loza Receives 2024 Hartwell Foundation Award to Advance Pediatric Predictive Modeling

Andrew Loza, MD, PhD, Instructor of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science, and jointly in Pediatrics at Yale School of Medicine, has been awarded the 2024 Hartwell Individual Biomedical Research Award. The award includes $300,000 in direct research support over three years and recognizes early-stage, innovative biomedical research with the potential to significantly improve children’s health.

Dr. Loza's research focuses on developing next-generation predictive models to enhance care for hospitalized children. His funded project aims to create a deep learning "foundation model" tailored to pediatric clinical data, with the goal of rapidly accurately identifying children at risk of life-threatening deterioration, such as sepsis or respiratory failure.

By leveraging transformer architectures and pre-training techniques, Dr. Loza's model will be able to interpret complex, longitudinal clinical sequences – such as vital signs, laboratory results and medication histories – where temporal and contextual relationships are essential. Once developed, the model will be fine-tuned for high impact clinical prediction tasks, including early diagnosis of sepsis, anticipation of respiratory support needs, risk of intensive care unit (ICU) transfer, and likelihood of hospital readmission.

If successful, the project could enable real-time clinical decision support tools that alert care teams to potential deterioration earlier and more accurately – allowing for faster, more targeted interventions. It also represents a transformative step forward in how machine learning can be applied in pediatric medicine, bringing content-aware AI tools directly to the bedside.

Dr. Loza will be formally recognized as a 2024 Hartwell Investigator at the upcoming 2025 Hartwell Annual Meeting of Biomedical Research, scheduled for October 5–8 in Baltimore, Maryland.

For more information about the Hartwell Foundation and its mission to fund innovative research to benefit children’s health, visit https://thehartwellfoundation.com.