Karthik V. Sarma, MS, was elected to the American Medical Association Board of Trustees (BOT) in November 2016. He is a medical student at the David Geffen School

of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he is currently pursuing his research doctorate in bioengineering as a trainee at the UCLA-Caltech Medical Scientist Training Program in the UCLA Medical Imaging Informatics lab. Mr. Sarma has been active in organized medicine since he joined the UCLA MD/PhD program in 2011. He led the effort to create the AMA Medical Student Section Committee on Health Information Technology and served as its first chair. Prior to joining the AMA-BOT, he was a member of the AMA House of Delegates for four years as part of the California delegation and served on the AMA Council on Medical Service. Currently he is the vice chair of the California Medical Association (CMA) Subcommittee on Health Information Technology, having previously served on the CMA Board of Trustees in 2014.

Mr. Sarma’s research focuses on the development of novel augmented intelligence techniques for medical applications. His current work at UCLA seeks to assist radiologists and pathologists focusing on diagnosis, staging, and treatment of prostate cancer by adopting modern computer vision approaches to the development of computerized clinical decision support systems (CDS). He is the recipient of an F30 fellowship from the National Institutes of Health and several other awards and grants. In addition to his work in prostate CDS, Mr. Sarma’s work also includes the evaluation of social media as a predictive tool for health status, the use of artificial intelligence for stroke prognosis estimation, and the development of patient portals for effectively sharing understandable medical information. A native of Chicago, Mr. Sarma is an alumnus of the California Institute of Technology, where he received the degree of Bachelor of Science with honors in computer science. He currently lives in Los Angeles.