About me
Dennis Trujillo, Ph.D., is the founder and CEO of Mercurial AI, a Chicago-based healthcare AI startup building Sona Health, a multilingual, voice-first platform designed to give cancer patients and care teams instant access to evidence-based answers across clinical guidelines, trials, and real-world data. Driven by the loss of his father to cancer and his roots in northern New Mexico, Dennis founded Mercurial AI with a mission to ensure that language, literacy, and geography never stand between a patient and quality care. Sona Health is currently piloting at Mayo Clinic and Montefiore, backed by 757 Ventures, Plug and Play, and Sputnik ATX, with $500K raised in a pre-seed round.
Dennis holds a Ph.D. in Computational Materials Science from the University of Connecticut and completed postdoctoral research at Argonne National Laboratory's X-Ray Science Division, where he worked on ptychography and SAXS imaging. He has authored 18+ peer-reviewed publications spanning physics-informed machine learning, molecular dynamics, and density functional theory. His career bridges deep technical expertise with applied AI leadership, having served as a Senior AI Scientist at Artisight and in research computing roles at Washington University in St. Louis. With experience across high-performance computing infrastructure, large-scale GPU clusters, and clinical AI systems, Dennis brings a rare combination of scientific rigor and entrepreneurial drive to the oncology AI space.
