S1, E9: Martin Leach, PhD, MBA, CDO of Black Canyon Consulting

This week’s episode of Practical AI in Healthcare dives into AI, truth, and the future of data in the government with Dr. Martin Leach, Chief Data Officer at Black Canyon Consulting.

Dr. Martin Leach, PhD, is a data, science, and technology leader with a career spanning some of the most innovative organizations in life sciences and academia. A self-described “data geek,” Martin began his career as a molecular neuropharmacologist before shifting from the bench to data-driven discovery. Over the past two decades, he has held senior roles at Merck, Biogen, Alexion, and AstraZeneca, and was the inaugural Chief Information Officer at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Today, Martin serves as Chief Data Officer at Black Canyon Consulting, where he works these organizations on projects that unite bioinformatics, AI, and data federation — from building semantic knowledge graphs to creating “gold-standard” datasets for model validation. His work bridges the worlds of science, computation, and policy, shaping how government and industry can responsibly harness AI to advance biomedical research and healthcare delivery.

From building gold-standard datasets to exploring quantum AI, Martin shares how these projects are shaping the next generation of healthcare data science.