Frida Polli, a neuroscientist, entrepreneur, investor, and inventor known for her leading-edge contributions on the crossroads of behavioral science and artificial intelligence, is MIT’s latest visiting innovation scholar for the 2024-25 academic 12 months. She is the primary visiting innovation scholar to be housed inside the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.
Polli began her profession in academic neuroscience with a deal with multimodal brain imaging related to health and disease. She was a fellow on the Psychiatric Neuroimaging Group at Mass General Brigham and Harvard Medical School. She then joined the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT as a postdoc, where she worked with John Gabrieli, the Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and a professor of brain and cognitive sciences.
Her research has won many awards, including a Young Investigator Award from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation. She authored over 30 peer-reviewed articles, with notable publications within the , the , and . She transitioned from academia to entrepreneurship by completing her MBA on the Harvard Business School (HBS) as a Robert Kaplan Life Science Fellow. During this time, she also won the Life Sciences Track and the Audience Alternative Award within the 2010 MIT $100K Entrepreneurship competition as a member of Aukera Therapeutics.
After HBS, Polli launched pymetrics, which harnessed advancements in cognitive science and machine learning to develop analytics-driven decision-making and performance enhancement software for the human capital sector. She holds multiple patents for the technology developed at pymetrics, which she co-founded in 2012 and led as CEO until her successful exit in 2022. Pymetrics was a World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneer and Global Innovator, an Inc. 5000’s Fastest-Growing company, and Forbes Artificial Intelligence 50 company. Polli and pymetrics also played a pivotal role in passing the first-in-the-nation algorithmic bias law — Latest York’s Automated Employment Decision Tool law — which went into effect in July 2023.
Making her return to MIT as a visiting innovation scholar, Polli is collaborating closely with Sendhil Mullainathan, the Peter de Florez Professor within the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Economics, and a principal investigator within the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. With Mullainathan, she is working to bring together a broad array of school, students, and postdocs across MIT to deal with concrete problems where humans and algorithms intersect, to develop a brand new subdomain of computer science specific to behavioral science, and to coach the following generation of scientists to be bilingual in these two fields.
“Sometimes you get lucky, and sometimes you get unreasonably lucky. Frida has thrived in each of the facets we’re trying to have impact in — academia, civil society, and the marketplace. She combines a startup mentality with an abiding interest in positive social impact, while able to ensuring the type of mental rigor MIT demands. It’s an exceptionally rare combination, one we’re unreasonably lucky to have,” says Mullainathan.
“Individuals are increasingly interacting with algorithms, often with poor results, because most algorithms should not built with human interplay in mind,” says Polli. “We’ll deal with designing algorithms that may work synergistically with people. Only such algorithms may help us address large societal challenges in education, health care, poverty, et cetera.”
Polli was recognized as one in every of Top 100 Female Founders in 2019, followed by being named to Top 100 Powerful Women in 2020, and to the 2024 list of 100 Good Women in AI Ethics. Her work has been highlighted by major outlets including , , , , , , , , and
Beyond her role at pymetrics, she founded Alethia AI in 2023, a corporation focused on promoting transparency in technology, and in 2024, she launched Rosalind Ventures, dedicated to investing in women founders in science and health care. She can be an advisor on the Buck Institute’s Center for Healthy Aging in Women.
“I’m delighted to welcome Dr. Polli back to MIT. As a bilingual expert in each behavioral science and AI, she is a natural fit for the faculty. Her entrepreneurial background makes her a terrific inaugural visiting innovation scholar,” says Dan Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the Henry Ellis Warren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
