The OLLI Distinguished Speakers Series presents:

Engineering Trustworthiness: Moving from Broken to Whole

with Dr. Julia Wattacheril

Tuesday, August 19, 2025 at 7:00 p.m. ET

Online via Zoom

While physicians and scientists have traditionally been among the most trusted professionals worldwide, recent years have seen a significant erosion of that trust. Systemic failures, conflicting incentives, and institutional betrayals have contributed to this decline, leaving many searching for a better way forward.

In this talk, Dr. Wattacheril will explore a physician-scientist’s perspective on making meaning out of suffering, broadening our understanding of what it truly means to care for others, and teaching, inspiring, and implementing the most valuable dimensions of science and healthcare.

Julia Wattacheril, MD, MPH is an associate professor of medicine, physician scientist, inventor and director of the Metabolic Dysfunction Associated Steatotic Liver Disease (MASLD) program at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Her clinical and translational work spans the multidisciplinary care of MASLD patients at all stages of their disease to the investigation of rare genetic variants influencing the development and progression of MASLD before and after liver transplantation. She currently leads an interdisciplinary research group using machine learning to identify at-risk and protected phenotypes within the electronic health record (EHR) for multi-omic analysis. Of particular interest for clinical outcomes discovered through EHR phenotyping include rapid progression to advanced liver disease, need for transplantation and hepatocellular carcinoma. She recently was awarded the Department of Surgery Innovation Award and Columbia Department of Biomedical Engineering Ignition Award for these software applications as they move into medicine.

The teams Dr. Wattacheril leads are made of individuals with computational acumen and clinical expertise and include the relational and ethical capacities required in the care of humans, by humans, across data science. Her current projects test hypotheses at scale across populations. She has a particular commitment to develop and translate science and medicine not just across disciplines but to those most affected and often least included in the conversation.

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Ticket information:

Admission is $10 for OLLI at BCC members and $15 for the general public.

Admission is free for students, staff and faculty from Berkshire Community College, MCLA, Williams, and Columbia University; youth 17 and under, and those holding WIC, EBT/SNAP, or ConnectorCare cards.