Andre Esteva, who received his BS at Texas ECE, has been recognized for his groundbreaking work with artificial intelligence at Stanford, where he is currently pursuing his PhD in Electrical Engineering. According to a new paper published in the journal Nature, Esteva and a team of researchers have trained a computer to identify images of skin cancer moles and lesions as accurately as a dermatologist. In the future, this new research suggests, a simple cell phone app may help patients diagnose a skin cancer - the most common of all cancers in the United States - for themselves.

Andre Esteva is currently a student in Sebastian Thrun’s Group at Stanford as a part of the Artificial Intelligence Lab of Computer Science. The Thrun Lab is a team of expert computer scientists with the singular aim of significantly helping society through artificial intelligence technologies. Esteva’s research focus is on machine and deep learning, with his preferred application domains being the areas of medical and biological systems. His current focus is in dermatology, where is is working to develop deep-learning algorithms to automatically track and diagnose skin cancers from images of patients. During his time as Texas ECE, Esteva’s research focused on invisibility cloaking as part of Prof. Andrea Alù's Metamaterials and Plasmonics Research Lab. He finished undergraduate degrees in Electrical Engineering and Pure Mathematics, with highest honors, from The University of Texas at Austin in December 2011 and was awarded the Outstanding Scholar-Leader Award for academics and leadership on campus - the highest honor awarded to a graduating engineering senior.