Who we are.

The Institute for AI Translation (the Institute for AIT) and doáb are carried day to day by a small core team.

The core team

Salim Afshar, MD, FACS

Founder of the Institute for AI Translation and of doáb, its cooperative.

Dr. Afshar has worked across the full spectrum of healthcare delivery and innovation, from care as a surgeon to national health strategies with governments. He has led in-country hackathons in several countries, including India, and co-founded an innovation fellowship. Most recently he founded Reveal HealthTech, an AI data-engineering firm that builds with health ecosystems, medical-device companies, life sciences, and governments. His present concern is the building of human capacity, so that every community may take part in the potential of artificial intelligence, and apply it toward the betterment of its own people.

Alison Bird

Chief of Staff

The Institute for AI Translation and doáb · Bogotá

Alison Bird leads institutional strategy, operations, and partnerships architecture for the Institute and doáb. Over nearly two decades in international development and diplomacy, she directed more than $1.3 billion in multi-year programmatic investments and $238 million in annual grantmaking across Latin America, Africa, and Asia. She complements co-founder Dr. Salim Afshar by translating the Institute’s method into operational systems, so health ecosystems and communities can build their own AI capacity on their own terms. She works in English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese, and is based in Bogotá, Colombia.

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Governance

Held independently, announced as confirmed.

The Institute is a nonprofit corporation governed by an independent board, with its research agenda and evidence standards held by the Academic Council. Board and council appointments are announced as they are confirmed.

The councils

Convened as the work requires.

Councils form by developmental milestone, not by date: each is convened when the work it exists to govern has emerged, and its founding cohort is announced when confirmed.

Convening 2026

Academic Council

Holds the research agenda and methodological standards; bounds what the Institute may claim as evidence.

Convening 2026

Technology Council

Counsel on frontier models, machine learning in health, data infrastructure, and security.

Convening 2026

Capital & Financing Council

Counsel on funding a non-extractive model with discipline: blended structures, recoverable grants, catalytic capital.

Three further bodies form as the work matures: a Partnerships circle, spanning countries, multilateral institutions, businesses, and sponsors, convened as country engagements multiply; a Venture Council, formed as the cooperative's first cohort of ventures emerges; and an Integrity Council, the operational conscience of the whole, whose function rests with the board until operations warrant it.

Accompaniment

Those who accompany the work.

The Institute and doáb are accompanied by counselors, builders, and friends across health systems, technology, finance, and development. They appear here in their personal capacity; affiliations are shown for identification only.

Backgrounds include service at organizations such as: Anthropic · The World Bank · The International Committee of the Red Cross · UNICEF · Wellington Management · Google · Amazon · The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health · Harvard Medical School · Boston Consulting Group

All individuals participate in their personal capacity. Organizations are named solely to describe the professional backgrounds of the individuals involved; their names are the property of their respective owners, and no affiliation with, sponsorship of, or endorsement by any organization named is stated or implied.

The founder

The path that led here.

Salim Afshar, MD, FACS

Salim Afshar, founder of the Institute for AI Translation

Salim Afshar began in engineering and design in the 1990s, writing software in C++, Java, and PHP, and made his first venture pitch at MIT in 2000. Medical training followed: a D.M.D. from the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, an M.D. from Harvard Medical School, and surgical training that led to practice at Boston Children’s Hospital. He is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons. Over the course of that clinical work he treated thousands of patients.

With the Program in Global Surgery and Social Change he contributed to national surgical planning, including support for Zambia’s first National Surgical, Obstetric, and Anesthesia Plan. In India and Rwanda, between 2016 and 2019, he founded Surgathons: six events engaged more than fifteen hundred multidisciplinary students. The model was published in BMJ Global Health in 2020.

He then sought out Professor Rifat Atun, who became a mentor. That relationship led him into the Health Systems Innovation Lab at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The Lab’s course in health-systems innovation is the origin of the current AI for Health Systems hackathon, Atun’s work, and his credit. Afshar later became its AI Translation Lead.

In 2020 he retired from clinical practice and turned toward a gap he could no longer treat as incidental: technology was growing exponentially, while organizations still could not translate it into their own conditions. He invested with W Health Ventures, founded Reveal HealthTech, and in 2023 Reveal joined CancerX as a founding member. He remains Founder and Chief Medical and Innovation Officer there, and continues to teach as Assistant Professor at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine. Field notes appear in The AI Translation Briefing.

The technology was never the hard part. The hard part was the people, the organization, and the assumptions no one had said out loud. This Institute exists to hold that gap. The Founder and CEO remains in the work. This is not a consulting practice under another name.

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