Abstract

This is a fascinating time for computational biomedicine. We can engage with extremely large complex data sets that are relevant to medicine at the level of populations (eg. epidemiology, disease trajectories) or single molecules (eg drugs, proteins or RNA sequences), genetics/genomics (eg genomes, single cell analysis, perturbations) as well as imaging, and many other features and levels of resolution. Radical changes in the computational abilities of generative AI are changing the way we interact with these data and generative AI will greatly impact research as well as the practice and teaching of medicine.

Biography

Dr. Robert Gentleman is the founding executive director of Harvard Medical School’s Center for Computational Biomedicine. An accomplished statistician and bioinformatician, Dr. Gentleman is one of the creators of the R programming language and a founder of the Bioconductor project, an open-source collaborative software tool to promote statistical analysis of biological data. He has served as vice president of 23andMe, where he helped launch their therapeutic division, and as senior director for bioinformatics and computational biology at Genentech. He was head of computational biology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and held academic positions at Harvard University, University of Auckland and the University of Waterloo. Dr. Gentleman’s research interests are related to genomics, machine learning, data visualization, and the application of statistical and computational methods to study human disease.