Plenary Session Speakers

• Prof. Andrew Z. Fire, Nobel Laureate, Stanford University
  Andrew Zachary Fire is an American biologist and professor of pathology and of genetics at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with Craig C. Mello, for the discovery of RNA interference (RNAi). Andrew Fire was born in Palo Alto, California and raised in Sunnyvale, California. He graduated from Fremont High School. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he received a B.A. in mathematics in 1978 at the age of 19. He then proceeded to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a Ph.D. in biology in 1983 under the mentorship of Nobel laureate geneticist Phillip Sharp. Fire moved to Cambridge, England, as a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow. He became a member of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology group headed by Nobel laureate biologist Sydney Brenner. From 1986 to 2003, Fire was a staff member of the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Embryology in Baltimore, Maryland. The initial work on double stranded RNA as a trigger of gene silencing was published while Fire and his group were at the Carnegie Labs. Fire became an adjunct professor in the Department of Biology at Johns Hopkins University in 1989 and joined the Stanford faculty in 2003. Throughout his career, Fire has been supported by research grants from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Fire is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also serves on the Board of Scientific Counselors and the National Center for Biotechnology, National Institutes of Health.



• Prof. Eric Grimson, Chancellor, MIT
  Eric Grimson has recently been appointed the Chancellor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT, and holds the Bernard Gordon Chair of Medical Engineering. He also holds a joint appointment as a Lecturer on Radiology at Harvard Medical School and at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Prof. Grimson has previously served as the Education Officer for the Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and as Associate Department Head. Since 2005, he has been serving as the Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He received a B.Sc. (High Honors) in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Regina in 1975 and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from MIT in 1980. Prof. Grimson is a member of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and his group has pioneered state of the art systems for activity and behavior recognition, object and person recognition, image database indexing, image guided surgery, site modeling and many other areas of computer vision. Prof. Grimson is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a Fellow of the IEEE, and was awarded the Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching in the School of Engineering at MIT.



• Charles P. Friedman, Chief Scientific Officer, ONC in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
  Charles P. Friedman, PhD. is currently the Chief Scientific Officer for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.- As ONC's chief scientist, he leads a group responsible for tracking and promoting innovation in health IT, for research programs to improve technology, for applications of health IT that support basic and clinical research, for evaluation of all of ONC's programs, for programs to develop the health IT workforce, and for activities supporting global eHealth. Prior to joining ONC, Dr. Friedman was Associate Director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Friedman first joined NIH in 2003, as a Senior Scholar at the National Library of Medicine.-From 1996 to 2003, Dr. Friedman was Professor and Associate Vice Chancellor for Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh. He also served as Chief Information Officer for the University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences. Dr. Friedman obtained bachelors and masters degrees in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and also received a PhD in education from the University of North Carolina (UNC). He spent over 19 years on the medical school faculty at UNC and served as Assistant Dean for Medical Education and Informatics. In 1985, he established the Laboratory for Computing and Cognition at UNC and, in 1992, started UNC's medical informatics training program. Dr. Friedman has written extensively for scientific journals, and authored a well-known textbook.- He is a past president of the American College of Medical Informatics, and was the 2005 chair of the Annual Symposium of the American Medical Informatics Association. He currently serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

Invited Sessions Speakers

• Prof. Russ Altman, M.D. Ph.D, Stanford University
  Prof. Altman is the Chairman, Department of Bioengineering Director, Biomedical Informatics Training Program at Stanford University. He is interested in the application of computational technologies to problems in molecular biology of relevance to medicine. In particular, his laboratory focuses on (a) building structured information repositories to support biological research including the creation of a comprehensive pharmacogenomics knowledge base (http://www.pharmgkb.org/), (b) elucidation and analysis of three dimensional structures through physics-based simulation, and (c) computational methods for analyzing functional genomics information from microarray data. Prof. Altman has been a Fellow of International Society for Computational Biology, a Fellow of American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and a Fellow, American College of Physicians. He received his AB degree from Harvard and M.D and Ph.D from Stanford University.

• Prof. Seyoung Kim & Eric Xing, Carnegie Mellon University
  Prof. Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Machine Learning Department in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Prof. Eric Xing is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. They have quickly emerged as the leaders in the development and application of statistical machine learning methods to systems biology problems. A talk version of their tutorial at ISMB 2011 "On Modern Statistical Methods for Genetic Association Study: Structured Genome-Transcriptome-Phenome Association Analysis" will be presented.

Panelists