Bio
Prof. Francisco M. De La Vega is a geneticist and computational biologist with interests in cancer, population, and clinical genomics, and with extensive experience in the life sciences industry. He is a Distinguished Scientific Fellow and Vice President of Bioinformatics and at TOMA Biosciences, a privately held start-up company commercializing a technology for precision oncology derived from inventions at Stanford. Francisco is also Adjunct Professor in the Department of Biomedical Data science of the Stanford School of Medicine, a Director of the International Society of Computational Biology, and is or has been a member of the Steering Committee of the NIST-led Genome-in-a-Bottle consortium, the PanCancer Analysis of Whole Genomes project of the ICGC, and the Steering Committee of the 1000 Genomes Project. He has more recently contributed to start-up companies in the life sciences area in positions such as CSO (Annai Systems) and VP of Genomics (Real Time Genetics, Omicia). Previously, he spent over 13 yeas at Applied Biosystems (later Life Technologies and currently Thermo-Fisher), where he played a pivotal role in the development of several successful genetic analysis technologies. For this, he was inducted in 2009 to the Innovation & Invention Society of Life Technologies, a program that recognized the company’s most elite inventors, and in 2008 was a co-recipient of the Bio-IT World Best Practices Award in Basic Research.