Executive Committee
Leadership
- Associate Professor of Medicine and Genetics and, by courtesy, Pathology
- Director, Stanford Center for Inherited Cardiovascular Disease
- Director, Stanford Cardiopulmonary Exercise Testing Laboratory
- Co-Director, Stanford Clinical Genomics Service
Euan Ashley's group is focused on the application of genomics to medicine. In 2010, he led the team that carried out the first clinical interpretation of a human genome. The paper published in the Lancet was the focus of over 300 news stories, became one of the most cited articles in clinical medicine that year, and is currently featured in the Genome Exhibition at the Smithsonian in DC.
The team extended the approach in 2011 to a family of four and now routinely apply genome sequencing to the diagnosis of patients at Stanford hospital where Dr Ashley directs the Clinical Genome Service and the Center for Inherited Cardiovascular Disease.
Euan is a recipient of the National Innovation Award from the American Heart Association (AHA) and a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director's New Innovator Award. He is a Principal Investigator of the Myocardial Applied Genomics Network (MAGnet), a member of the leadership group of the AHA Council on Functional Genomics, and a member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academy of Sciences Roundtable on Translating Genomic-Based Research for Health. He is a peer reviewer for the NIH and the AHA as well as journals including Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet and the Journal of Clinical Investigation, He is co-founder of, and advisor to, Personalis, Inc, a Menlo Park based genetic diagnostics company.
Born and raised in Scotland, Euan graduated with 1st class Honors in Physiology and Medicine from the University of Glasgow. He completed medical residency and a PhD in molecular cardiology at the University of Oxford before moving to Stanford University where he trained in cardiology and advanced heart failure joining the faculty in 2006. Father to three young Americans, in his "spare" time, he tries to understand American football, plays the saxophone in a jazz quartet, and conducts research on the health benefits of single malt Scotch whisky.
- Kenneth Fong Professor of Bioengineering, Genetics, Medicine and, by courtesy, of Computer Science
- Past Chairman, Bioengineering
Russ Altman's primary research interests are in the application of computing and informatics technologies to basic biological problems relevant to medicine. He is particularly interested in methods for understanding drug action at molecular, cellular, organism and population levels.
His lab studies how human genetic variation impacts drug response (e.g., http://www.pharmgkb.org/). Other work focuses on the analysis of biological molecules to understand the action, interaction and adverse events of drugs (http://feature.stanford.edu/). He leads one of seven NIH-supported National Centers for Biomedical Computation, focusing on physics-based simulation of biological structures (http://simbios.stanford.edu/). Russ received the US Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians, the American College of Medical Informatics, and the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. He is a past president, founding board member, and a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology, and the President-Elect of the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics. He currently chairs the Science Board advising the FDA Commissioner. He is an organizer of the annual Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (http://psb.stanford.edu/) and a founder of Personalis, Inc. He won the Stanford Medical School graduate teaching award in 2000.
Russ holds an AB from Harvard College, an MD from Stanford Medical School, and a PhD in Medical Information Sciences from Stanford.
- Professor of Radiology (General Radiology) and, by courtesy, of Management Science and Engineering
Sylvia Plevritis, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Radiology in the Stanford University School of Medicine and (by courtesy) the Department of Management Science and Engineering in the Stanford School of Engineering. Dr. Plevritis holds a PhD in electrical engineering and an MS in health services research from Stanford.
She is the co-section chief of Integrative Biomedical Imaging Informatics at Stanford, director of the NCI Stanford Center for Cancer Systems Biology, and director of the Cancer Systems Biology Scholars postdoctoral training program. Dr. Plevritis’ research bridges multiple levels of “big data”in cancer, including genomic, single cell mass/flow cytometry, medical imaging, pathology, and clinical outcomes. Her research at the molecular level involves modeling the role of differentiation in understanding epigenetic mechanisms of cancer drug resistance and identifying novel therapeutic strategies. Her efforts to develop computer models of clinical cancer progression from cancer registries and clinical trials aim to improve the effectiveness of cancer screening and treatment strategies by informing policy making and individual decision making. By spanning molecular and population sciences through novel analytics, Dr. Plevritis aims to provide a more comprehensive perspective on cancer control strategies in early detection and treatment.
Members
- Chair, Department of Biomedical Data Science
- Professor, Department of Genetics, Stanford University
- Co-Founding Director, Stanford Center for Computational, Human, and Evolutionary Genomics
- Director of Informatics, Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine
Carlos Bustamante is a population geneticist whose research focuses on analyzing genome wide patterns of variation within and between species to address fundamental questions in biology, anthropology, and medicine. More From 2002-2009, he was on the faculty at Cornell University in the Departments of Statistical Sciences and Biology Statistics and Computational Biology where he was promoted to full professor in 2008. Since 2010, he has been on the faculty in the Department of Genetics at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
He has received multiple honors and awards including a Marshall-Sherfield Fellowship (2001-2), the Sloan Research Fellowship (2007), and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship (2010). He has trained over 50 post-doctoral fellows and graduate students as primary advisory and co-authored over 130 papers. Much of his research is at the interface of computational biology, mathematical genetics, and evolutionary genomics.
His most current research focuses on human population genomics and global health including developing statistical, computational, and genomic resources for enabling trans- and multi-ethnic genome-wide association and medical sequencing studies of complex biomedical traits. He is one of the Principal Investigators of the recently announced $25M ClinGen project to build the country's National Database of Clinically Relevant Genomic Variants.
He has advised multiple companies, non-profits, and government bodies in the past including Mars, Inc., Ancestry.com, Personalis, Inc., the National Human Genome Research Institute, and the Carlos Slim Foundation.
- Director, Stanford Center for Population Health Sciences
- Professor of Medicine
Mark Cullen is the Director of the recently established Stanford Center for Population Health Sciences. An internationally known expert in occupational medicine, the focus of Dr. Cullen’s research has been on the physical and social aspects of work that contribute to disparities in health, function and mortality; and development of new observational methods to study them.
- Professor in School of Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University
Hector Garcia-Molina is the Leonard Bosack and Sandra Lerner Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He was the Chair of the Computer Science Department from January 2001 to December 2004. Garcia-Molina is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; More is a member of the National Academy of Engineering; received the 1999 ACM SIGMOD Innovations Award; is a Venture Advisor for Onset Ventures, is a member of the Board of Directors of Oracle, and is a member of the State Farm Technical Advisory Council.
- Associate Professor of Energy Resources Engineering and, by courtesy, of Mechanical Engineering and of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Margot Gerritsen’s expertise is in the computer simulation of natural and engineering processes. Her areas of interest include reservoir processes, coastal ocean dynamics and data science. Margot currently holds a faculty position in the Department of Energy Resources Engineering in the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences (SE3). She is the director of the Institute for Computational & Mathematical Engineering (icme.stanford.edu), and the Senior Associate Dean in Education Innovation in SE3. More She holds courtesy positions in Mechanical Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Margot teaches courses in applied mathematics, reservoir simulation, and energy processes. In her spare time, Margot enjoys spending time with her son in the outdoors, and at jazz gigs.
Margot earned an MSc in Applied Mathematics from the University of Technology in Delft, Netherlands. She left the Netherlands in 1990 in search of hillier and sunnier places and received her PhD in Scientific Computing and Computational Mathematics from Stanford in 1996. Before coming back to Stanford, she held a faculty position at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
- Professor of Chemistry and, by courtesy, of Structural Biology
Prof. Pande is currently the Director of the Program in Biophysics, Director of the Folding@home Distribtued Computing project, and the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Professor of Chemistry and, by courtesy, of Structural Biology and of Computer Science at Stanford University. His current research centers on the development and application of novel cloud computing simulation techniques to address problems in chemical biology. In particular, he has pioneered novel distributed computing methodology to break fundamental barriers in the simulation of kinetics and thermodynamics of proteins and nucleic acids. More As director of the Folding@home project (http://folding.stanford.edu), Prof. Pande has, for the first time, directly simulated protein folding dynamics with quantitative comparisons with experiment, often considered a “holy grail” of computational biology. His current research also includes novel computational methods for drug design, especially in the areas of protein misfolding and related diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease.
Prof. Pande received a BA in Physics from Princeton University in 1992. There, he was first introduced to biophysical questions, especially in his undergraduate thesis research with Prof. Philip Anderson, a Nobel Laureate in physics. Three years later, in 1995, he received his PhD in physics from MIT, studying as a NSF Fellow under Profs. Toyoichi Tanaka and Alexander Grosberg. At MIT, Prof. Pande’s research centered on statistical mechanical models of protein folding and design, suggesting novel ways to design protein sequences to have the desired stability and folding properties. As a Miller Fellow working with Prof. Daniel Rokhsar at UC Berkeley, Prof. Pande extended this methodology to examine atomistic protein models, laying the foundations for his later work at Stanford University.
Prof. Pande has won numerous awards, including the DeLano Prize in Computational Biology (2015), Michael and Kate Bárány Award for Young Investigators from Biophysical Society (2012), Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shift Award, American Chemical Society (2010), Fellow of the American Physical Society (2008), Irving Sigal Young Investigator Award from the Protein Society (2006), the MIT Indus Global Technovator’s Award (2004), a Henry and Camile Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar award (2003), being named to MIT’s TR100 (2002), and named a Frederick E. Terman Fellow (2002).
- Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Christopher (Chris) Re is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University and a Robert N. Noyce Family Faculty Scholar. His work's goal is to enable users and developers to build applications that more deeply understand and exploit data. Chris received his PhD from the University of Washington in Seattle under the supervision of Dan Suciu. For his PhD work in probabilistic data management, Chris received the SIGMOD 2010 Jim Gray Dissertation Award. More He then spent four wonderful years on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, before moving to Stanford in 2013. He helped discover the first join algorithm with worst-case optimal running time, which won the best paper at PODS 2012. He also helped develop a framework for feature engineering that won the best paper at SIGMOD 2014. In addition, work from his group has been incorporated into scientific efforts including the IceCube neutrino detector and PaleoDeepDive, and into Cloudera's Impala and products from Oracle, Pivotal, and Microsoft's Adam. He received an NSF CAREER Award in 2011, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 2013, a Moore Data Driven Investigator Award in 2014, and the VLDB early Career Award in 2015. Chris was an early member of and continues to be an adviser to Context Relevant.
- Professor of Health Research and Policy (Biostatistics) and Statistics
Robert Tibshirani's main interests are in applied statistics, biostatistics, and data mining. He is co-author of the books Generalized Additive Models (with T. Hastie), An Introduction to the Bootstrap (with B. Efron), The Elements of Statistical Learning (with T. Hastie and J. Friedman), Introduction to Statistical learning (with G. James, D. Witten and T. Hastie) and Sparsity in Statistics (with T. Hastie and M. Wainwright). His current research focuses on problems in biology and genomics, medicine, and industry. With collaborator Balasubramanian Narasimhan, he also develops software packages for genomics and proteomics.
Director
- Director, Strategic Initiatives – Biomedical Data Science
Janet Kalesnikoff has been a member of the Stanford community for twelve years. In her most recent position as the Associate Director of the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute, she organized and coordinated efforts to support the research, education and outreach missions of the institute.
Janet received her PhD in Experimental Medicine from the University of British Columbia, Canada, and completed her postdoctoral training with Stephen Galli in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University. She has co-authored over 30 papers and her scientific areas of expertise include immunology, cell signaling, and molecular biology. More specifically, she employed genetic approaches to elucidate the roles of mast cells (key effector cells in asthma and other allergic disorders, as well as certain protective immune responses to parasites) in health and allergic inflammation. While at Stanford, Janet also worked as an Instructor at the UC Berkeley Extension, where she developed and taught the General Biology lecture and laboratory courses.