Links within this page: Robert Gentleman | Amy Lee
Robert Gentleman
Principal Research Scientist,
Dept of Data Science at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute
Dr. Robert Gentleman, Ph.D. is a prominent Canadian statistician and bioinformatician, internationally recognized for his pioneering contributions to statistical computing and bioinformatics. He is the co-creator of the R programming language, a foundational tool in modern data science, and the founder of the Bioconductor project, a widely used open-source software platform for biomedical and genomic data analysis.
Dr. Gentleman is the Founding Executive Director of the Center for Computational Biomedicine at Harvard Medical School. Over his career, he has held academic appointments as well as senior leadership positions in industry, including at Genentech and 23andMe.
He has been honored with the Benjamin Franklin Award in Bioinformatics and is a Fellow of both the International Society for Computational Biology and the American Statistical Association. Through his groundbreaking work, Dr. Gentleman has bridged the gap between computer science and biology, transforming how researchers analyze biological data and shaping the future of computational biology.
Amy Lee
Simon Fraser University
Dr. Lee joined the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at Simon Fraser University as an Assistant Professor in 2020. She completed her PhD in Cell and Systems Biology at University of Toronto with Drs. David Guttman and Darrell Desveaux, studying the evolutionary arms race between host and pathogens. This was followed by two postdoctoral fellowships at University of British Columbia (UBC), first with Dr. Nislow, applying comparative bacterial genomics and phenomics to study bacterial adaptation in persistent infections. She then worked with Dr. Bob Hancock applying systems immunology and vaccinology to understand neonatal immune development. She is a Banting Discovery Awardee and a Michael Smith Health Research BC Scholar. Her current research uses systems biology approaches to improve neonatal sepsis diagnostics and combat antimicrobial resistance.