Founder Spotlight
Meet Yll Agimi, PhD, MPH, MS
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I'm an epidemiologist by training who became a health data scientist over 15+ years turning messy, large-scale EHR and claims data into decisions clinicians and policymakers can actually act on. As a Presidential Innovation Fellow and senior data scientist across the Military Health System, I've led AI-driven research on traumatic brain injury, built predictive models for long-term disability, and directed engineering teams shipping real-time analytics at national scale. The thread through all of it: I don't stop at a finding, I build the thing that uses it.
What inspired you to start R2ML?
I spent a career in consulting and watching rigorous research stall on the way to practice, a strong analysis that never became a workflow, a dashboard, or a policy change. I founded R2ML to close that gap deliberately. We don't just publish evidence; we engineer the pipeline, model, or decision tool that puts it to work, and we measure success by the outcome it moves, not the paper it produces.
What kind of problems are you excited to solve?
The ones where the data exists but nobody has connected it to a decision yet. That's meant clustering 250K+ TBI patients to expose hidden gaps in provider treatment adherence, adapting civilian disability-registry methods to flag which service members are headed toward long-term disability before it happens, and using NLP to reclassify an entire medical workforce so an HR system could finally see what its people actually do. I'm most energized by problems that force science, engineering, and operations to work in the same room.
What makes R2ML's approach unique?
Most people can run the model. Fewer can tell you which model actually changes a decision-maker's behavior, and build the thing that gets it in front of them. That's the R2ML difference: scientific rigor paired with a bias for shipping. We've led 10-engineer teams to production, we've rewritten how an agency codes its own workforce data, and we stay embedded with stakeholders from the first question through the last deployed dashboard, because an insight that never reaches a decision was never really an insight.
Yll Agimi
Principal Investigator & Founder
Presidential Innovation FellowExpertise
- Traumatic Brain Injury
- Military Epidemiology
- Machine Learning
- Neuropsychological Informatics
- Public Health Policy
- Comorbidity Analysis