People

Atul Butte, MD, PhD, Professor, Director of UCSF’s Institute for Computational Health Sciences (ICHS). Former Professor of Pediatrics and Genetics, and by courtesy, Medicine, Pathology, and Computer Science, at Stanford University and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. Dr. Butte trained in Computer Science at Brown University, worked as a software engineer at Apple and Microsoft, received his MD at Brown University, trained in Pediatrics and Pediatric Endocrinology at Children’s Hospital Boston, then received his PhD in Health Sciences and Technology from Harvard Medical School and MIT. Dr. Butte is Chief of the new Division of Systems Medicine at Stanford. Dr. Butte is also a founder of three investor-backed companies: Personalis, providing clinical interpretation of whole genome sequences, Carmenta, discovering diagnostics for pregnancy complications, and NuMedii, finding new uses for drugs through open molecular data. Dr. Butte has authored more than 160 publications, with research repeatedly featured in Wired Magazine, and in the New York Times Science Times and the International Herald Tribune (2008), Wall Street Journal (2010 -2012), San Jose Mercury News (2010), and the San Francisco Chronicle (2013). In 2013, Dr. Butte was recognized by the White House as an Open Science Champion of Change for promoting science through publicly available data. Other recent awards include the 2013 induction into the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the 2012 FierceBiotech IT “Top 10 Biotech Techies”, 2011 National Human Genome Research Institute Genomic Advance of the Month, 2010 Society for Pediatric Research Young Investigator Award, and the 2008 AMIA New Investigator Award.

Sanchita Bhattacharya is currently leading the efforts to leverage open-access clinical trials and research data from ImmPort, a National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Division of Allergy, Immunology, and Transplantation (NIAID-DAIT) sponsored shared data repository for subject-level human immunology study data and protocols. Her projects involve “The 10,000 Immunomes Project”, a diverse human immunology reference derived from over 44,000 individuals across 291 studies. Sanchita comes with over sixteen years of work experience as a data scientist at various academic institutions such as Stanford School of Medicine, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and MIT. Her formal training in bioinformatics coupled with expertise in computational modeling and immunology has led to a number of publications demonstrating the repurposing of big data in Immunology and other research areas to facilitate translational research.

Marie is a resident in Rheumatology from France, and a PhD student in System Biology at Sorbonne Universite in Paris. She completed a master’s degree in Immunology at Institut Pasteur and Sorbonne Université and received her MD from University of Paris. She has a strong interest in computational biology, multi-omics and machine learning approaches especially in osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis.

Andrew completed his undergraduate degree at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the department of mechanical engineering. He then received his MD from Harvard Medical School. He completed residency in anesthesia and perioperative Care at University of California, San Francisco and is a board certified anesthesiologist. Andrew is an NIH T32 post-doctoral research fellowship recipient and a clinical instructor in the department of anesthesia and perioperative care at UCSF. He spends part of his week as a clinical anesthesiologist and the rest of his time applying artificial intelligence to medicine through machine/deep learning techniques for time series analysis, imaging, language processing, and decision support.

Jaysón Davidson is currently a PhD student with the Pharmaceutical Sciences and Pharmacogenomics program. He completed his undergraduate degree in Biochemistry at Hampton University in Hampton, VA where he also played Division I football and completed a post-baccalaureate program at Baylor College of Medicine in Biomedical Science before coming to UCSF. In the Butte Lab, he is extremely interested in clinical informatics with the intent to develop methods to effectively stratify the differences in disease and drug response outcomes between populations with different social determinants to improve healthcare.

Greg is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Butte lab and a resident in the Physician Scientist Pathway in the department of Laboratory Medicine, where he is developing artificial intelligence and deep learning applications with a focus on laboratory medicine, hematopathology, and diseases of the blood, bone marrow, and immune system. Greg previously double-majored in Computer Science and Biological Sciences at Stanford University. He then received a Masters in Bioengineering at Stanford, followed by a Whitaker International Bioengineering research fellowship at Imperial College London. Next, Greg received an MD/PhD from the Medical Scientist Training Program at UC San Diego. During his PhD, he combined computational and wet-lab approaches to discover and characterize novel drug targets with applications in parasitology, mycology and cancer, for which he was the recipient of three Bill and Melinda Grand Challenge Exploration grants.

Zicheng completed his undergraduate degree at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. After that, he moved to The University of Texas at Austin, where he earned his Master’s degree in Statistics and PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology from Lauren Ehrlich’s lab. He used knock-out mouse models to study the roles chemokine receptors play in the autoimmune diseases. Currently, he is focused on characterizing dynamics of the human immune system using high through-put data.

Andrew Jan is chief of staff to Atul Butte, MD, PhD. Andrew has previous work experience at UC Berkeley and UC Office of the President, UC Education Abroad Program. He holds a master’s degree in History from UCLA; a master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies from UT Austin; and bachelor’s degrees from UC San Diego. In that capacity, he participated in study abroad in Cairo, Egypt; Salalah, Oman; and Istanbul, Ankara, and Cunda, Turkey. Andrew spends all of his free time with dogs, including wrangling his Pomeranian mix named Toby and volunteering at Oakland Animal Services.

Brenda is currently a PhD student with the Biomedical Informatics program. She completed her undergraduate degree in biology and computer science at Dartmouth College. In the Butte Lab, she is particularly interested in using computational immunology and clinical informatics to identify effective strategies for chronic disease management.