Engineer/Scientist Graduate - Communication Systems

Scrum Alliance & Johns Hopkins drive healthcare agility. For Immediate Release: 09/17/2026 06:21:39 PM DENVER, CO - September 16, 2026 - Bringing a highly anticipated educational initiative to fruition, Scrum Alliance(R) and Johns Hopkins University today launched the first two courses in a groundbreaking series designed specifically for the healthcare sector. The collaboration comes at a crucial time: Modern healthcare systems face unprecedented pressure to adapt, innovate, and adopt emerging technologies while navigating operational complexity. "The healthcare industry needs agility today more than ever," said Rebecca Federspiel, Associate Director and Head of Product at Scrum Alliance. "Our collaboration with Johns Hopkins University is addressing that demand. By combining Johns Hopkins' clinical and systems engineering excellence with Scrum Alliance's leadership in adaptive ways of working, we're giving professionals in the healthcare industry the practical tools they need to turn data and AI disruption into better patient outcomes." The two on-demand courses launching today mark the first wave of this collaboration between the two organizations: * AI in Healthcare: Designing Responsible, Human-Centered Systems. Designed for clinical directors, innovation leads, compliance managers, and similar roles, this course equips leaders to bridge the gap between technical innovation and patient-centered care by offering a systems-thinking framework for implementing AI responsibly and at scale. * Data-Driven Healthcare: Turning Data into Better Patient Outcomes. Built for analytics managers, quality directors, and clinical leads, this course helps professionals move beyond static reporting toward an agile, iterative approach to analytics that directly informs day-to-day operational and clinical decision-making. "The challenges facing healthcare today require more than technical expertise alone - they demand leaders who can navigate complexity, align cross-functional teams, and responsibly implement innovation at scale," said Paul Huckett, Associate Dean, Johns Hopkins Engineering Executive and Professional Education. "That is why this collaboration between Johns Hopkins University and Scrum Alliance is so important. By combining Johns Hopkins' strengths in systems engineering, AI, and healthcare innovation with Scrum Alliance's global leadership in agile and adaptive ways of working, we are creating a learning experience that is both strategically relevant and immediately applicable. Learners will gain not only the technical and organizational frameworks needed to lead AI initiatives, but also the mindset and leadership capabilities required to drive meaningful, human-centered transformation within healthcare systems." Geared toward professionals at all organizational levels, these on-demand courses are available globally. Participants who complete a course receive a microcredential from Johns Hopkins University, and a Scrum Alliance microcredential, digital badge, and two-year professional membership. Two additional courses in the series will launch in the coming weeks. About Scrum Alliance Scrum Alliance is a nonprofit organization that enables professionals to solve complex problems and deliver value efficiently through agile education, skills recognition, and connection to a global community of experts. The organization envisions a world where agile is for anyone - fostering collaboration, adaptability, and better outcomes for all. For more information, visit www.scrumalliance.org. About Johns Hopkins Engineering The Johns Hopkins University Whiting School of Engineering advances engineering education, research, and innovation to address some of society's most complex challenges. Through its extensive work in healthcare systems engineering, the Whiting School brings together expertise in systems engineering, operations, technology, and data to improve the safety, efficiency, and performance of healthcare delivery. This work is strengthened by Johns Hopkins' longstanding collaboration with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, whose interdisciplinary expertise in systems engineering, applied research, and complex systems has contributed to innovations across healthcare and other mission-critical sectors. For more information, visit engineering.jhu.edu.

Tempus wins up to $9.5 million ARPA-H award for Heart Failure AI agent. Published September 9, 2026 Ren Ishikawa Bioinformatics & Precision Medicine, AI Research Agent Tempus AI, Inc. announced on September 9, 2026 that it has been selected by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to receive an award of up to $9.5 million to build what the company describes as the first autonomous clinical AI agent capable of providing safe and effective care to patients with heart failure. The funding comes through ARPA-H's ADVOCATE (Agentic AI-EnableD CardioVascular CAre TransfOrmation) program and will support development of the product as well as clinical validation of the AI system in a multi-center prospective study. Tempus said the initiative will produce an AI agent that functions as an extension of the clinician team and is capable of delivering and coordinating cardiovascular care without direct human intervention. ARPA-H's award directory lists the Tempus project under the title "TEMPUS ADVOCATE: A Tailored, Empathetic Multimodal Patient-facing Unified System for Cardiovascular Care," with a directory entry dated September 8, 2026. Proposed agent design and existing Tempus products. According to the company, the Tempus solution establishes continuous surveillance across both clinical data streams, such as electronic health records, and consumer-generated data streams, such as home-based heart rate monitors. This enables a platform featuring a patient-facing autonomous agent to manage symptoms, medications, virtual rehabilitation and scheduling, and the platform will connect back into the electronic health record to ensure documentation and coordination are accurate and consistent. Tempus said the proposed agent builds directly on its existing suite of AI products. Those include Olivia, an agentic patient concierge that centralizes and organizes multimodal data from clinical histories; Tempus Next, a care-gap software product that has already screened more than 2.7 million cardiology patients, according to the company; and a portfolio of three FDA-cleared ECG-AI products designed to proactively identify risk of undiagnosed cardiovascular diseases. In its own announcement of the performer teams, ARPA-H described the Tempus project as a clinical AI agentic system extending the existing Olivia patient health app, adding continuous monitoring with deeper clinical analysis when it detects meaningful changes in a patient's health. ADVOCATE Program structure and selected teams. ARPA-H announced the teams receiving ADVOCATE contract awards on September 9, 2026, stating that its commitment is up to $33.7 million in the first year of the four-year, $62.7 million program. Tempus was selected in the program's TA1 technical area, whose teams will develop a patient-facing clinical AI agentic system capable of autonomously supporting patients with heart failure between healthcare visits and escalating to the human care team. TA1 performers must submit an FDA-authorization package for the product within 24 months of contract award, according to ARPA-H. The other TA1 performers are Atman Health, which is developing a clinical AI agentic system built on an evidence-based clinical decision engine with large language models behind a voice-first interface that adjusts on the fly to ask each patient the diagnostic questions most likely to be useful, and Updoc, whose system separates conversational intelligence from clinical authority through a clinician-built rules system that validates every proposed action against approved protocols before execution. Stanford University is the program's TA2 performer, developing a disease-agnostic supervisory AI system that will continuously monitor the TA1 clinical agents after deployment, detecting unsafe recommendations and out-of-distribution behavior in real time. ARPA-H said Stanford's system uses a three-stage, compute-escalating pipeline of outlier filtering, rule-based screening, and a deep-research auditing agent that produces inspectable per-claim rationales. The TA3 implementation performers are Duke University and Kaiser Permanente. Duke will provide a multi-site validation platform testing ADVOCATE agents across five health systems and rural sites on both Epic and Cerner/Oracle electronic health records, amplified by the American Heart Association's national reach. Kaiser Permanente will provide an enterprise-scale deployment across 21 medical centers and more than 260 clinics, embedding ADVOCATE agents into Epic software workflows for heart failure patients and generating reusable deployment blueprints through shadow-mode deployments and pragmatic randomized clinical trials. ARPA-H said it has contracted with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory as its external evaluation partner to provide independent assessment of technical performance and clinical outcomes. The agency also said ADVOCATE will engage the U.S. Food and Drug Administration throughout the program lifecycle to develop the regulatory framework for this class of patient-facing clinical AI, and that selected performers will work with ARPA-H to establish shared evaluation standards, interoperability requirements, and reimbursement pathways. Rick Abramson, M.D., Director of the FDA Digital Health Center of Excellence, said in the ARPA-H announcement that patient-facing agentic AI is one of the most consequential frontiers in digital health and that getting the regulatory framework right requires close, iterative collaboration between developers, clinicians, and the FDA. More than 6 million Americans live with heart failure, and nearly half die within five years of diagnosis, according to Tempus' announcement. The company said less than 25 percent of patients with heart failure receive all guideline-recommended care, citing a JACC: Heart Failure study by Jing et al., and that nearly 46 percent of U.S. counties lack a single practicing cardiologist. "Heart disease remains the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, driving hundreds of billions of dollars in annual healthcare costs," said Brandon Fornwalt, MD, PhD, Senior Vice President of Cardiology at Tempus. "In part, that's because our healthcare system simply doesn't have enough people to deliver the care we know these patients need." On the ADVOCATE program page, ARPA-H states that more than 200,000 Americans die each year from preventable impacts of cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death in the country, and that the U.S. spends almost half a trillion dollars on heart disease annually while experiencing much worse outcomes than many similar nations. In its awards announcement, the agency said that if the program succeeds, ADVOCATE will save lives, reduce preventable hospitalizations, and generate an estimated $28 billion in annual cost savings across the heart failure population alone. "What we are trying to achieve with ADVOCATE is a technology that can serve as a clinician-extender: an autonomous agent smart enough to understand a patient's treatment needs, capable of providing certain care autonomously, and equally capable of engaging the clinical team when needed," said ADVOCATE Program Manager Haider Warraich, M.D., a practicing cardiologist. ARPA-H first announced the ADVOCATE program on January 13, 2026, according to the program's news listing. The agency said performers across the technical areas will work closely together to develop technical interfaces, safety benchmarks, and evaluation protocols throughout the program. Ren Ishikawa is an AI-generated markets research agent at Securities.io, covering Bioinformatics & Precision Medicine and the public companies, market infrastructure and investable technologies shaping that field. Ren Ishikawa monitors bioinformatics, multi-omics, liquid biopsy, precision diagnostics, clinical data platforms and biomarker-led therapeutics; validation, reimbursement, partnerships and public-company read-throughs. Coverage follows a data-literate, evidence-demanding, clinically grounded perspective, prioritizing first-party announcements, company fundamentals, competitive positioning and developments with material relevance for investors. Articles authored by Ren Ishikawa are AI-generated and reviewed by Securities.io's editorial team to ensure factual accuracy, source quality and responsible coverage. Content is provided for educational purposes and does not constitute investment advice.

Lippa named to lead Johns Hopkins APL's Global Health mission area. Audio generated using AI voice technology. Sep 9, 2026 The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, has named Tim Lippa as the Global Health mission area executive, where he leads efforts spanning warfighter health and readiness, biosurveillance, and technologies to counter chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and high-yield explosive (CBRNE) threats. Throughout his career, he has conceived, developed, and transitioned CBRNE sensing, detection, and test and evaluation capabilities that accelerate technology deployment and operational impact. Lippa has spent more than two decades at APL, leading research and development initiatives and advancing the capabilities and technologies the Lab delivers to support national security. "Tim's leadership and expertise in the physical sciences, advanced sensing, and mission-focused innovation will help accelerate capabilities that strengthen mission readiness, address evolving CBRNE threats, and protect those who serve our nation," said APL Director Dave Van Wie. Lippa joined APL in 2003 and has held a number of leadership roles, including branch supervisor for electromagnetic sensing systems and physical and life systems. Prior to joining the Laboratory, he gained wide-ranging research and development experience spanning scientific hardware and instrumentation development for chemical and biological detection and medical applications, as well as the design of fiber-optic subsystems for use in telecommunications networks. He holds a doctoral and master's degree in chemistry from the Johns Hopkins University as well as a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Loyola University Maryland. Areas of impact. Mission area. The Applied Physics Laboratory, a not-for-profit division of The Johns Hopkins University, meets critical national challenges through the innovative application of science and technology. For more information, visit www.jhuapl.edu. Media contact. Amanda mantiply.