Luis Sanchez

Dr. Sanchez develops and validates AI-enabled diagnostic and clinical decision-support technologies for neurological disorders and brain health. An enterprise technology executive and former DARPA principal investigator, he combines decades of leadership in cybersecurity and infrastructure with translational healthcare AI.

Dr. Sanchez studies how the brain organizes and distributes energy, and how that organization reflects neural health. His work introduces the Neural Health Index (NHI), a physiologically grounded marker derived from the spatial distribution of resting-brain energy that can be computed from EEG, MEG, or fMRI. Validated across more than 800 participants spanning neurological, psychiatric, neurodevelopmental, and neurodegenerative disorders, NHI distinguishes healthy from clinical populations with high sensitivity and specificity, scales with disease severity, and generalizes to unseen diagnoses, pointing toward a disease-agnostic, modality-invariant biomarker for disease stratification and treatment monitoring. He also mentors graduate researchers in biomedical AI.

Before returning to academic research, Dr. Sanchez spent more than three decades as a technology executive and engineer, including serving as founder and chief information and technology officer of a multinational technology and security services firm and as a principal investigator leading more than $6.5 million in DARPA-funded network defense research. He is an inventor on four issued U.S. patents, an author of three IETF Internet Standards, and a Senior Member of the IEEE and the National Academy of Inventors. He earned a PhD in Biomedical Engineering with support from an NDSEG Fellowship. He holds Master’s degrees in Bioinformatics and Electrical Engineering and a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering.