Russ Biagio Altman, MD, PhD

Russ Biagio Altman is the Kenneth Fong Professor of Bioengineering, Genetics, Medicine, Biomedical Data Science and (by courtesy) Computer Science, and past chairman of the Bioengineering Department at Stanford University. He also serves on the advisory board of Nebula Genomics, a personal whole genome sequencing company. His research applies computing (informatics, data science and AI) to problems relevant to medicine. He is interested in methods for understanding drug action, efficacy and adverse effects while integrating molecular, cellular, organism and population data. His lab has a special focus on how human genetic variation impacts drug response—pharmacogenomics. He is the founding Principal Investigator of the Pharmacogenomics Knowledgebase (PharmGKB.org). He helps lead an FDA-supported Center of Excellence in Regulatory Science & Innovation, and is an Associate Director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

Dr. Altman holds an AB from Harvard College, an MD from Stanford Medical School, and a PhD in Medical Information Sciences from Stanford. He received the U.S. 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 (ACP), the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI), the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. He is a past-president, founding board member, and a fellow of
the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), and a past-president of the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics (ASCPT). He has chaired the Science Board advising the FDA commissioner, served on the NIH Director’s Advisory Committee, and co-chaired the IOM Drug Forum. He is an organizer of the annual Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing, and a founder of Personalis (NASDAQ: PSNL). Dr. Altman is board certified in Internal Medicine and in Clinical Informatics. He directed the Stanford Biomedical Informatics training program from 2000-2018, and currently directs the undergraduate major in Biomedical Computation. He received the Stanford Medical School graduate teaching awards in 2000 & 2020 and its mentorship award in 2014. He is the founding editor of the Annual Reviews of Biomedical Data Science, and hosts a podcast entitled “The Future of Everything.”