Links within this page: Philip E. Bourne | Carlos D Bustamante | Partha P Majumder | Marinka Zitnik

Biography

Philip E. Bourne, PhD, FACMI is the Stephenson Founding Dean of the School of Data Science, Professor of Data Science and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia, USA. Prior to that he was the Associate Director for Data Science (ADDS; aka Chief Data Scientist) for the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and a Senior Investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). In his role as ADDS he led the trans NIH US $110M per year Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) research initiative and contributed to data policies and infrastructure aimed at accelerating biomedical discovery. Examples include: establishing the NIH Commons, support for data and software citation and establishing preprints as a supported form of research. Prior to joining NIH, Dr. Bourne was Associate Vice Chancellor for Innovation and Industry Alliances in the Office of Research Affairs and a Professor in the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). Dr. Bourne is a Past President of the International Society for Computational Biology, an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). He has published over 500 papers and 5 books garnering over 105,000 citations and co-founded 4 companies. Awards include the Jim Gray Award eScience Award and the Benjamin Franklin Award. His current research focuses on data science methods (including AI) applied to systems, pharmacology structural bioinformatics and scholarly communication. He has a strong interest in helping the next generation through the Ten Simple Rules series of professional development articles and his work as Dean of one of the few data science schools worldwide where new models of higher education are being emphasized.

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Biography

Dr. Carlos Bustamante is one of the world’s foremost thought leaders in population genetics and genomics and brings immense knowledge and relationships key to the company’s success. A leading academic in the field of medical and population genomics, his background includes roles as a Venture Partner at F-Prime Capital, SAB member with Digitalis Ventures, Founder of Arc Bio, advisor to numerous startups, and former Professor of Genetics / Biomedical Data Science at Stanford University (now adjunct). Dr. Bustamante was also awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2010 for his contributions to population genetics (mining DNA sequence data to address fundamental questions about mechanisms of evolution, origins of human genetic diversity, and patterns of population migration).

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Biography

Partha P. Majumder is a Distinguished Professor of the John C. Martin Centre for Liver Research & Innovations, Kolkata; and, an Emeritus Professor of the Indian Statistical Institute.  Until recently, he was a National Science Chair in India.  He has made significant contributions to human-, statistical- and population genetics and genomics. He has developed methodologies for mapping human disease genes, identified genomic factors underlying many diseases notably oral cancer, and has reconstructed the ancestries and relationships of ethnic populations groups of India and Asia using genomic methods. He has immensely contributed to capacity-building in human and statistical genetics in India. He has founded the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics, India.

He is an elected Fellow of all the three national science academies of India, The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) and the International Statistical Institute. He has served as the President of the Indian Academy of Sciences and of the West Bengal Academy of Science & Technology.

He is a Member of the Executive Committees of the international Human Cell Atlas consortium and the International Common Disease Alliance.  He serves as an expert on genomics for the World Health Organization.

He has received many awards and honours, including the G.N. Ramachandran Gold Medal (2021) of the Government of India; Barclay Memorial Medal (2020) of The Asiatic Society; Golden Jubilee Commemoration Medal (2018) of the Indian National Science Academy; TWAS Prize in Biology (2009) of The World Academy of Sciences, Trieste.

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Biography

Marinka Zitnik is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School, Associate Faculty at the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University, and an Associate Member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Zitnik investigates the foundations of AI that contribute to the scientific understanding of medicine and therapeutic design, with the goal of enabling AI to learn and innovate on its own. Her research has received numerous awards, including Kavli Fellowship of the National Academy of Sciences, NSF CAREER Award, and awards from the International Conference on Machine Learning, Bayer Early Excellence in Science, Amazon Faculty Research, Google Faculty Research, Roche Alliance with Distinguished Scientists, and Sanofi iDEA-iTECH. Zitnik founded Therapeutics Data Commons, a global open-science initiative to evaluate AI across stages of development and therapeutic modalities. Through the AI4Science initiative, she develops foundation models, benchmarks, and open datasets to empower discovery across biology and medicine.

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