Frank Herbert reading in front of bookshelves, 1984
Thou shalt not make a machine
in the likeness of a human mind. Frank Herbert · Dune · 1965

I see this as one of the really important sentences to think about (and it was really far ahead of its time). Although I'm optimistic about the introduction of AI to our lives and to healthcare, I see that we need to actively work to make sure we nudge development toward “setting us more free” from work, cognitive and mental load, and other burdens, and make sure we don't nudge development toward worst-case scenarios (that might even feel like sci-fi now). This is my main area of research: safety, equity and alignment of AI in medicine.

Mahmud Omar

Hi all, my name is Mahmud, I'm a physician, and a researcher focused on clinical genAI, more specifically of testing and ensuring the models work to make equity, safety and assurance better and not worse :)

Most of my working hours (other than the clinic of course) is figuring out what language models do, and don't do, when you put them next to medicine. For example, most of what I publish lives around a handful of questions. What clinical recommendations LLMs hallucinate, and why. How their advice shifts when the patient's identity is named, or the same clinical case is worded differently. What happens when AI agents move from answering questions to working with patient records. My aim, or really the dream is, to get continuous equity and safety driven evaluation, hard-carried guardrails that test equity, debiasing, diversity in data presentation and safe, not unwarrantedly varied LLM outputs in medicine. In simple terms: the AI gives the accurate, yet personal answer, in medicine for you, no matter who you are, what language you talk, how you look, and which are your preferences (other than not finding Better Call Saul as the best series ever, this is not acceptable).

In my research work, I'm currently working as the Head of Research at the BRIDGE GenAI Lab in BIDMC (Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School), and work as a research scientist at the Windreich Department of Artificial Intelligence and Human Health, at Mount Sinai.

SO, if this talks to you, and you think you and I can collab, really collab on actionable unique and novel ideas, I think we might connect (maybe we'll talk also, among others, about epic fantasies? books? lego? serieses? and beautiful nature places in the world?)

Mahmud Omar in a northern valley
back in 2025, far far north, in a beautiful place :)

Publications

equity and context

How patient identity and the wording of a case change clinical recommendations.

evidence and clinical judgment

What models cite, what they get wrong, and how that changes the advice they give.

agents and evaluation

How we test clinical AI, improve its answers, and check what happens when it acts.

Essays

Personal notes on AI, consciousness, human creativity and how all of this connects (just me thinking out loud, but with citations).

October 2026

The Ease of Being Understood

On agreeability, human judgment, and what it means to feel understood.

Elsewhere

BRIDGE Lab · mahmud@mahmudomar.com