Rafael de Castro Figueroa

Rafael Figueroa is the CEO and co-founder of Portal Telemedicina, a Brazilian startup that has developed a revolutionary medical tele-diagnostic and Population Health Management platform. Recognized by the United Nations (UN), the company has been selected as one of the top 10 companies globally to accelerate the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Rafael has been acknowledged by Google as one of the 40 authorities worldwide in Machine Learning and serves as a mentor for startups in Silicon Valley, Japan, and Brazil through Google's Launchpad Accelerator.In 2021, Rafael made history as the first Brazilian to deliver a lecture on digital health and artificial intelligence for the Data Science discipline at Harvard Medical School.In 2022, he was invited to contribute a chapter on telemedicine and artificial intelligence in the book titled "Resilient Health: Leveraging Technology and Social Innovations to Transform Healthcare for COVID-19 Recovery and Beyond." This publication by Academic Press is edited by Judy Kuriansky and Pradeep Kakkattil, both global leaders in social projects associated with the UN.Rafael holds a degree in Economics from the Federal University of Santa Catarina and is a specialist in Design Thinking from Berkeley University. With five years of experience in investment banking, he is an expert in applied mathematics to algorithms. Prior to his work in the healthcare technology field, he completed an internship at Google and founded two other startups.As a researcher in the field of Artificial Intelligence, Rafael has led over 10 studies, including the Artificial Intelligence Life Analytics (AILA) project at the São Paulo Research Foundation (Fapesp). Additionally, he coordinated the research on COVID-19 detection in radiological exams for the Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovation, and Communications (MCTI), and supervised the government of São Paulo's RD scholarship on IoT applied to digital health.Furthermore, Rafael was a founder of Green Society, an NGO dedicated to bringing technologies such as solar energy, drones, and internet access to rural families. (Source: Lattes Curriculum)