Karthik Sarma

Karthik V Sarma MD PhD is a founding investigator and computational medical scientist at the UCSF AI in Mental Health (AIMHealth) Research Group, a practicing psychiatrist at UCSF Health, and co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at SimX, Inc. At UCSF, Karthik’s research focuses on the development of novel artificial intelligence techniques for behavioral health applications, with a focus using large language models to interpret patient and clinical text, perform psychiatric reasoning, and assist in the delivery of clinical care. The foci of AIMHealth include the development of digital psychometrics that can assist in the selection and optimization of behavioral health treatment, the use of AI-based methods to interpret and synthesize behavioral health data disseminated across electronic health records, and the design of methods to enable safe, effective use of autonomous agents in behavioral health diagnostics and therapeutics.

Karthik is also a member of the House of Delegates of the American Medical Association (AMA), where he represents the American Psychiatric Association, and the Councils on Medical Service and Legislation of the California Medical Association. He previously served on the Board of Trustees of the American Medical Association, where he worked to develop the first comprehensive policy on artificial intelligence in medicine. He received his MD and PhD from UCLA and his BS (Hons) in Computer Science from the California Institute of Technology.