Wade Shen comes to ARPA-H with extensive experience in academic R&D, startups, and public service. In government, he served as Director of the National AI Initiative Office (NAIIO) at the White House in the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and as program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) where he ran a portfolio of AI/data science and hardware for AI programs. Shen was cofounder of Actuate, a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing the ARPA model of innovation to societal applications outside of national security. Shen was also a researcher and manager at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, where he worked on and oversaw research in AI and natural language understanding and was co-founder and CTO of Vocentric Corporation, an embedded speech and speaker recognition startup. At ARPA-H, Shen is the director of the Proactive Health Office where he manages a portfolio of R&D programs that aim to dramatically increase the health span of Americans by increasing their capacity to avoid disease and the symptoms of disease for as long as possible.