Marty Chavez's next act is beginning.
The former Goldman Sachs technology chief is joining the board of Paige, a New York-based start-up that aims to use artificial intelligence techniques to improve the diagnosis and treatment of cancer, according to a Friday press release.
"I've been drawn to the intersection of life sciences and computer science for a very, very long time," Chavez, 55, said in a telephone interview Friday, adding that he first started thinking about the topic his freshman year at Harvard in the early 1980s. "I imagined even back then that if you could take a radiology scan and give it to a computer, it would tell you whether it was cancerous or not."
Chavez left Goldman at the end of last year after almost two decades at the Wall Street firm, most notably as chief information officer, CFO and co-head of trading. He rode the wave of — and was a chief spokesman for — the rise of technologists on Wall Street as computing took over more of the markets' activities.
When he announced his departure in September, Chavez, who holds a Ph.D in Medical Information Sciences from Stanford University, indicated he was interested in applying what he learned in finance to the arena of health care.
"I see a lot of analogies to financial markets and to trading," Chavez said in the telephone interview. "Certain kinds of trading jobs no longer exist, right? They're done in software, but many, many crucial trading jobs continue to exist and they've gotten to be even more important. There's a collaboration between people and machines. And I would think that the general property of automation and machine learning applies across various domains. And so I expect that kind of evolution in healthcare."
Paige, founded in 2017 by cancer experts at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York, raised $45 million last month in a Series B funding round.