37m watch

Federal Health Leaders Explore Guardrails for AI

Thu, 11/05/2026

As federal agencies explore the potential of agentic AI, technology leaders are developing new approaches to governance, data security and system validation to ensure AI agents can operate safely and effectively.

Leaders from NIH, NCI, Red Hat and Intel will discuss emerging strategies for managing AI and super intelligence access to sensitive data, improving explainability and establishing safeguards that prevent unintended actions within critical systems. The discussion will also explore opportunities for AI to accelerate medical research and the steps agencies must take to move these capabilities from experimentation to real-world deployment.

Learn more about:

How federal agencies are developing AI and SI governance frameworks and managing agent access to sensitive data and critical systems.
Strategies for improving explainability, validating AI-generated actions and establishing technical guardrails for agentic systems.
Emerging opportunities for AI in medical research and the challenges agencies face in moving these capabilities into production.

Featuring

Brad Bower Chief Super Intelligence Officer, NIH
Brad Bower
- Chief Super Intelligence Officer
- NIH
Brad Bower is the Chief Super Intelligence Officer for the NIH.
Ben Cushing Chief Architect, Health and Life Sciences, Red Hat
Ben Cushing
- Chief Architect, Health and Life Sciences
- Red Hat
For two decades, Ben Cushing has been a leader in emerging technology solutions across multiple industries and is committed to radical innovation in healthcare. Before joining Red Hat, he served as the Chief Technology Officer for MDLogix, a behavioral health IT firm supporting Johns Hopkins Medicine. There he architected and brought to market a behavioral health cloud platform for use with employer, healthcare, and education markets.

In addition to supporting analytics and operations at the National Institutes of Health for 6 years, Cushing had the opportunity to practice a scaled agile framework with Accenture where he led the technical architecture and design for the Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) Electronic Health Management Platform, an industry leading Health Management and Care Coordination platform serving 9 million patients.

His tenure at Accenture began with the acquisition of Agilex, where he designed LSI solutions, developed systems to automate the Post-9/11 GI bill, and supported in-theater data collection and analytics tools. While at Agilex, Ben architected and led the development of a mobile Software Development Kit, still in use today by the VA to produce more than 60 applications.
Tanja Davidsen Chief, Data Ecosystem Branch, NCI, NIH
Tanja Davidsen
- Chief, Data Ecosystem Branch, NCI
- NIH
Dr. Tanja Davidsen is the Chief of the Data Ecosystem Branch at NCI’s Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (CBIIT). Her focus is on cancer, biological databases, cloud applications, and large-scale genomic data analysis. In her current role at the NCI, she is responsible for managing the Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC) which includes the Data Commons Framework, NCI Cloud Resource and seven data commons. She has also worked on large-scale cancer programs including The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatments (TARGET), and the Human Tumor Atlas Network (HTAN). Dr. Davidsen received her Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology from The Medical College of Virginia and her Bachelor of Science in Biology and Computer Science from The College of William and Mary.
Joshua Segovia AI Software Solutions Engineer, Intel
Joshua Segovia
- AI Software Solutions Engineer
- Intel
Joshua Segovia is an AI Software Solutions Engineer at Intel, supporting Financial Services and Health & Life Sciences enterprises. Josh’s expertise spans classical machine learning to cutting edge deep learning models, with a focus on harnessing Intel’s cutting-edge software and hardware to craft performant AI solutions across CPUs, GPUs, and AI accelerators. Josh is based in New York city, and holds a computer science degree from Columbia University.