David Sontag, PhD

David Sontag is the CEO and co-founder of Layer Health, as well as a Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at MIT. His work centers on building AI systems that reason over clinical data to answer complex care questions and accelerate research.

Before founding Layer Health, David led the Clinical Machine Learning group at MIT. Earlier, he was on the faculty at NYU’s Courant Institute after a postdoc at Microsoft Research. His research spans machine learning, causal inference, and clinical applications, with widely cited contributions across these areas.

David received his PhD in Computer Science from MIT (awarded the George M. Sprowls thesis prize) and his BA in Computer Science from UC Berkeley; he joined MIT’s IMES/EECS faculty in 2017 and is affiliated with CSAIL and IMES.