Max Lu

Founding Chief Science Officer

Max Lu, MS is the Founding CSO of Modella AI, where he leads the company's research in multimodal and generative AI for medicine and healthcare. Concurrently, Max is also a final year EECS PhD Candidate (AI and ML research specialization) at MIT, where he is working with Professor Faisal Mahmood at the forefront of representation learning, foundation models, and multimodal generative AI for computational pathology.

Max has led the development of multiple, impactful AI research and software applications, including: (1) CLAM, a data-efficient algorithm for weakly-supervised slide classification on commercial GPU workstations (Nature BME 2021), (2) TOAD, the first AI algorithm for predicting the origin in cancers of unknown primary using H&E histology slides (Nature 2021), (3) PathChat, a multimodal generative AI copilot for human pathology, among others (Nature 2024). His work has been featured in media outlets such as Harvard News, Stat News, ASCO Post, among others. Max received his B.S. in Biomedical Engineering and Applied Math & Statistics from Johns Hopkins University, a M.S. in Computer Science from MIT, and also a previous recipient of the Tau Beta Pi and Siebel Scholar PhD Fellowships.