Applied AI · Responsible Innovation · Research

Building AI that earns its place in the real world.

Carlos Morato is a VP of Applied Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence, researcher, and educator. For more than 25 years, he has led teams turning advanced AI into high-impact products across healthcare, search, robotics, and autonomous systems.

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25+

Years in AI & ML

45+

First-filing patents

3

Languages spoken

Ph.D.

Robotics & AI

01 / About

A systems thinker with a human-centered lens.

My work sits at the intersection of scientific rigor, product strategy, and practical deployment. I lead AI transformations that connect ambitious research with the controls, platforms, and teams needed to deliver meaningful results.

Today, I focus on generative and agentic AI, including preference alignment, multimodal reasoning, and systems that support individualized care. Across every domain, responsible AI is a design requirement—not an afterthought.

Generative AIAgentic SystemsResponsible AIRoboticsHealthcare AI

02 / Experience

Leading from research to real-world scale.

A selected career history spanning enterprise AI, search, autonomous systems, and academic research.

2021 — Present

Optum / UnitedHealth Group

Bellevue, WA

Vice President, Applied Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence

Sets enterprise AI strategy and leads the portfolio, platform, governance, and operating model that move AI and agentic systems safely into complex healthcare workflows. Drives capabilities spanning clinical intelligence, payment integrity, fraud detection, precision therapeutics, claims, and member experience.

  • • Builds multi-agent systems with guardrails, human oversight, and secure tool use.
  • • Establishes standards for monitoring, auditability, traceability, and model risk.
  • • Leads responsible AI, data governance, and enterprise-scale integration.
  • • Mentors ML scientists and engineers while advancing organization-wide AI literacy.

2017 — 2021

Microsoft, Core AI

Redmond, WA

Lead Principal Scientist Manager

Led the evolution of learning-to-rank toward transformer-based semantic ranking while improving the performance and deployment efficiency of large-scale ML workloads. Delivered search experiences including Contextual Ranking, Explore Further, and Affinity.

2014 — 2016

ABB, Corporate Research

Windsor, CT

Lead Principal Scientist, Machine Learning + Perception & Cognition

Advanced autonomous vessels, robot perception, navigation, motion control, and industrial AI. Managed and mentored a global team of 24 scientists and researchers and contributed to more than 15 first-filing patents.

Earlier work

MITRE · University of Maryland · IDSIA · Academic & R&D leadership

Built a foundation in autonomous navigation, SLAM, machine perception, data analytics, optimization, human–robot collaboration, and research program leadership across academia, industry, and public-sector innovation.

03 / Current focus

Where I’m putting energy now.

01

Agentic AI for care

Designing multimodal agents that reason, plan, use tools, and support complex healthcare workflows while keeping people in control.

02

Alignment & optimization

Advancing post-training and performance techniques—from DPO, PPO, and GRPO to quantization, sparsity, distributed training, and compiler-level optimization.

03

Trust by design

Embedding governance, fairness, transparency, and safety into the lifecycle of enterprise AI systems from the start.

04 / Research & education

Curiosity, shared.

Alongside industry leadership, I teach, mentor, publish, and contribute to the scholarly conversation around AI and its practical implications.

Harvard Medical School

Visiting Professor in Biomedical Informatics; teaching and researching NLP, deep learning, and applied AI.

Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Professor of Robotics Engineering & Computer Science, 2015–2020.

Selected 2025–26 research

Research on source-grounded synthetic EHR notes, multimodal risk prediction, scalable EHR foundation models, and LLM-agent planning.

Education

Ph.D. in Robotics (AI), University of Maryland, with graduate degrees in aerospace engineering, computer engineering, and machine learning.

Let’s connect

Interested in the future of responsible, high-impact AI?

cmorato@gmail.com

Seattle area · English, Spanish & Italian