LUSHAI

05.01  Prof. Alex Stokes

Founder & Lead Scientist
Associate Professor, Cell & Molecular Biology, JABSOM — University of Hawaiʻi

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Alex Stokes is the founder of LUSH.AI and an Associate Professor in the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology at the University of Hawaiʻi's John A. Burns School of Medicine (JABSOM), where they direct the Post-Baccalaureate Premedical Sciences Program. They are a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology (FRSB).

Much of their current work is artificial intelligence for health. As principal investigator, Dr. Stokes leads the ARCH Collaborative — an AI Resource Concierge for Healthcare federally funded by the National Institutes of Health AIM-AHEAD program — building AI tools that close health-equity gaps across Hawaiʻi and the Pacific. As principal investigator, their AIM-AHEAD portfolio also includes a pilot leveraging AI/ML to reduce the under-diagnosis of intersex individuals ($298,904) and HEART — Health Equity AI/ML Research & Training ($135,000), which upskills the region's workforce in health-equity AI/ML — together totalling more than $1.5 million as PI.

Beyond health AI, Dr. Stokes helps build the data-science research and training pipeline for the Hawaiʻi–Pacific region. They are key personnel on Hawaiʻi's $20 million NSF EPSCoR award — a Research Infrastructure Improvement (RII) Track-1 grant, “Change Hawaiʻi,” that uses data science to study and build resilience to climate change — and co-PI on the $8.5 million NSF INCLUDES ALL-SPICE Alliance, which grows regional data-science capacity for sustainability, economic development, and social justice. Further awards carry the same thread: NSF SCIPE (Cyberinfrastructure Pacific Professionals, $6.5M) builds a regional cyberinfrastructure workforce; as principal investigator they lead an NSF Scholarships in STEM (S-STEM) award ($1,499,736) supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income bioscience students through professional preparation in data science, and co-lead NSF Pacific Excellence in Analytics ($1M) funding data-science scholarships for Pacific students; and NSF CyberTraining ($1M) and BSCER JADE ($350K) develop cyberinfrastructure and justice-oriented data-science curricula.

Their laboratory research centres on ion-channel biology — the TRPA1 and TRPV1 channels — and the roles those channels play in cardiovascular health, cardiac hypertrophy, calcium signalling, and pain. That work has carried into the clinic and the market: they founded Makai Biotechnology to develop a novel heart therapy built on their University of Hawaiʻi research. They have also led pioneering work on intersex health, published in Nature.

Across LUSH.AI and OHUKU.com, Dr. Stokes builds biologically-inspired, AI-assisted software that lets people simulate and make sense of complex data — the thinking behind the LUSH Data Environment (LDE), and the subject of their patent on simulating, predicting, and visualising complex data. They hold a Ph.D. from the University of Warwick and an h-index of 26 across some sixty peer-reviewed papers.