Max Little

Atheist, Consultant, Engineer, Inventor, Parent, Scientist, Technologist

A data scientist with a background in math and stats, Max helps accelerate the search for cures for diseases such as Parkinson's by inventing radically simple, non-invasive technologies to measure symptoms outside the clinic. He developed algorithms that quantify Parkinson's symptoms using 30-second voice recordings, displacing expensive in-clinic physical exams. These algorithms detect Parkinson's signs in newly diagnosed patients to 98% accuracy, and work over the mobile phone network. Max is working to apply these algorithms to the environmental causes of disease: genetics is making extraordinary progress, but explains only a small part of the medical picture. By making these algorithms accessible to the global population where mobile phones currently have 75% reach, they could help fill in the massive hole in medical understanding about why one person gets ill but others do not.

Getting the most information possible from data about patients. It's a dirty secret of medical research that most patient data never gets to see the light of day.

It's not all in the genes - nurture matters much more than nature - we urgently need to know about our ourselves and our environment and we can start to do this with the technologies we have, today.

Applied Mathematics, Programming, Signal Processing, Statistics

Programming synthesizers, playing drum kit.