# Frida Polli

Frida Polli is a British-Italian-American neuroscientist, entrepreneur, inventor and investor known for her pioneering work at the intersection of behavioral science and AI.

## Education

Polli earned a BA with Honors from Dartmouth College, an MBA from Harvard Business School and a PhD from Suffolk University.

## Career

Polli's academic neuroscience career was spent at the Psychiatric Neuroimaging Division, a founding member of Massachusetts General Brigham/Harvard Medical School and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There, she oversaw large, multimodal imaging studies looking at markers of health and disease in illnesses such as depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and autism. Her work won awards including a Young Investigator Award from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, and was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Neuroscience, and Brain. She transitioned from academia to entrepreneurship by completing her MBA at Harvard as a Robert Kaplan Life Science fellow.
After HBS, she was CEO and co-founder of pymetrics, a company that pioneered the use of AI and behavioral science to improve workforce decisions, a technology used by companies like Blackstone and BCG. Pymetrics was a World Economic Forum's Technology Pioneer, an Inc 5000's Fastest Growing company, and Forbes AI 50 company. Polli was awarded multiple patents for the technology developed at pymetrics. Funded by Khosla Ventures, Workday, Salesforce, Randstad, and Mercer, the company had an exit in 2022.
Polli returned to MIT as a Visiting Innovation Scholar at the Schwarzmann College of Computing with Sendhil Mullainathan, she is launching an initiative to combine AI and behavioral science to build scalable algorithmic solutions to some of the world's biggest challenges. She is a multi-year member of the World Economic Forum's Global Future Councils. She is also an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Global Consortium for Reproductive Longevity and Equality at the Buck Institute. She started Alethia to promote ethical use of AI, and Rosalind Ventures to invest in women founders in science and healthcare.

## Selected publications

* Kassir, S, Baker, L, Dolphin, J, Polli FE (2002). AI for hiring in context: a perspective on overcoming the unique challenges of employment research to mitigate disparate impact. AI and Ethics, 4, 1-24.
* Wilson C, Ghosh A, Jiang S, Mislove A, Baker L, Szary J, Trindel K, Polli FE. Building and Auditing Fair Algorithms: A Case Study in Candidate Screening. Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, March 2021, 666–667.
* Polli FE, Kassir S, Dolphin J, Baker L, Gabrieli JDE. Cognitive Science as a New People Science for the Future of Work. Research Brief 18, MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future, January 2021.
* Polli FE, Barton JJ, Thakkar KN, Greve DN, Goff DC, Rauch SL, Manoach DS (2008). Reduced error- related activation in two anterior cingulate circuits is related to impaired performance in schizophrenia. Brain, 131(4), 971-86 .
* Polli FE, Barton JJS, Cain MS, Thakkar KN, Rauch SL, Manoach DS (2005). Rostral and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex make dissociable contributions during antisaccade error commission. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: U.S.A., 102(43), 15700-15705.