18F/18f.gsa.gov

---
title: "Presidential Innovation Fellows bringing new approaches to nation’s biggest challenges"
date: 2018-07-03
authors:
- gil-alterovitz
- justin-koufopoulos
tags:
- presidential innovation fellows
- day in the life
- health and human services
excerpt: "As the application process for the Presidential Innovation
Fellows (PIF) program ramps up, a number of applicants have been asking:
What is it like to be a Presidential Innovation Fellow? Two Fellows, Dr.
Gil Alterovitz and Justin Koufopoulos, share the origins of their
collaboration and a typical day in the life of a Fellow."
image:
---

As the application process for the [Presidential Innovation Fellows
(PIF)](https://apply.pif.gov/) program ramps up, a number of applicants
have been asking: What is it like to be a Presidential Innovation
Fellow? Two Fellows, Dr. Gil Alterovitz and Justin Koufopoulos, share
the origins of their collaboration and a typical “day in the life” of a
Fellow.

## First, some background on the dynamic duo:

Gil was [named a Presidential Innovation Fellow in
2017](https://www.gsa.gov/blog/2017/11/30/Meet-the-Newest-Presidential-Innovation-Fellows),
and [Justin the previous
year](https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/01/26/meet-newest-presidential-innovation-fellows).
One of the greatest privileges as Fellows is the ability to team up on
projects to tackle some of the biggest challenges government has to
offer. Fellows are often assigned together to a project, although
sometimes these collaborations happen naturally in the course of a
year-long project. The two former Fulbright Scholars share complementary
skill sets, Gil with a background in machine learning and medical
informatics, and Justin with a background in product management,
marketing, and entrepreneurship. Their collaboration kicked off in 2017
when they both realized they had similar passions in artificial
intelligence, open-source software, and helping patients.

## A day in the life of two PIFs:

It’s 7:00 a.m. Gil and Justin are both up early, each preparing for a
meeting with senior leadership at the Department of Health and Human
Services (HHS).

For Gil, it’s time to take a call from a leading scientist at the
Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Despite the scientist’s busy
schedule, Gil is able to schedule a call for his ride into the office.
Could there be potential synergies with the VA on matching patients to
experimental therapies? It turns out the VA has been interested in
matching veterans with clinical trials. After discussing potential next
steps on collaborating with VA, it’s time to head over to HHS.

Meanwhile, at home, Justin finalizes a pitch deck for HHS leadership.

Later that morning Gil, Justin, and technology leaders from around
government meet at HHS to discuss a new artificial intelligence (AI)
initiative to match patients with experimental therapies. The PIF
program is an entrepreneur-in-residence program. That means that in
order to get their projects moving, they need to use their talents as
entrepreneurs to convince people to join their projects. In the past,
some of the most successful Fellow projects
([code.gov](https://code.gov/),
[BlueButton](https://www.healthit.gov/topic/health-it-initiatives/blue-button),
and [18F](https://18f.gsa.gov/)) were spun out of interagency
collaborations among the White House, leaders from different agencies,
and front-line government employees.

The meeting at HHS goes well, and after a quick bite at the farmer’s
market just outside, it’s time for Gil and Justin to rush over to a
congressional briefing on “Artificial Intelligence for Good.” Justin and
Gil use the meeting as an opportunity to survey the landscape for new
partners for their project and both end up connecting with leaders from
other organizations who may be helpful in investigating AI to “sync for
therapies.”

After connecting with congressional offices, patient groups, and other
stakeholders on the Hill, Justin and Gil head off to the White House. A
meeting there leads to a new connection. Justin then heads back to his
agency to meet with his agency partners.

At its heart, the PIF experience is about engaging projects with
agencies. Over the past year, Justin has been detailed to the National
Library of Medicine (NLM), which is one of the 27 National Institutes of
Health (NIH) and home to many of the largest genomic, image, and text
biomedical datasets in the world, including scientific treasures like
PubMed and clinicaltrials.gov. Together, the PIF program has partnered
with senior leadership at NLM to make these datasets more readily
available to the public. Recognizing that scientists are looking more
and more for code — new algorithms and open source tools for
manipulating data — Fellows are now leading an effort to make scientific
code more reusable and easily available to scientists.

Justin gets on a call with his teammates from the NLM and National
Cancer Institute. They talk through criteria for software they might
include in a pilot project with the library, and then plan their work
for the upcoming week.

Later that afternoon, after doing some research and emailing with
scientists at the NIH about their biggest pain points with scientific
software, Justin schedules a few user interviews to test a prototype of
an index for scientific code. While it’s still an unapproved prototype,
its main purpose is to test an idea. It’s easy to forget coming from the
private sector, but oftentimes the most disruptive innovations are
working with agencies to see the value in low-cost prototypes. Creating prototype code, mockups, even interfaces sketched on paper — and then having data from interviews — is often among the most effective methods of creating buy-in around an idea within the federal government. This was successfully used for a number of projects that Justin and Gil worked on, including a prototype for code indexing inspired by PubMed: [“PubCode.”](https://github.com/NCBI-Hackathons/PubCode) An upcoming [data hackathon](https://ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2018/06/15/summer-2018-nih-data-hackathon-july-2018/) will explore how AI and machine learning can find patterns of similar eligibility protocol criteria for clinical trials that will leverage some of Gil and Justin’s work in this area.

While every Fellow comes to the program with a desire to have an impact
on the government, it’s ultimately up to each individual Fellow to make
the most of their experience. Fellows have developed new platforms for
sharing agency-level data, they’ve helped redesign how agencies interact
with the private sector, and have served on senior White House and other
interagency committees to produce key reports on science and technology
policy, such as via the National Science Technology Council of the White
House Office of Science Technology and Policy. In the process, each
Fellow gains new perspectives and memories for a lifetime.

One of the best parts of being a Fellow is that every day has unique
opportunities — and no two days are the same. We hope this gives you a
better glimpse of the incredible experiences you can have in the PIF
program. [Learn more](https://presidentialinnovationfellows.gov/)
about the program or [apply](https://apply.pif.gov/) to be a
Presidential Innovation Fellow for our upcoming class. Deadline to apply
for the fall 2018 cohort is July 6, 2018!

*The Presidential Innovation Fellowship (PIF) brings together top
innovators and their insights from outside of government, including the
private sector, non-profits, and academia. Their insights are brought to
bear on some of the most challenging problems within government and its
agencies. The goal is to challenge existing paradigms by rethink
problems and leveraging novel, agile approaches. PIF was congressionally
mandated under [H.R.
39](https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/39), the
Tested Ability to Leverage Exceptional National Talent (TALENT) Act. The
program is administered as a partnership between the White House Office
of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the White House Office of
Management and Budget (OMB), and the General Services Administration
(GSA). For more information, and to apply, see
[apply.pif.gov](https://apply.pif.gov/).*