Session Abstract – PMWC 2017 Silicon Valley
Session Synopsis: Several important, recently launched government initiatives have as a central focus disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. This session will provide a broad update on these initiatives, but will also focus on the technical challenges and potential solutions of precision medicine in the near and longer term which includes vision of precision medicine analytics and big data and the integration of wearables and everyday tech.
Speaker Profile
Ph.D., Program Director, Human Microbiome Project
Biography
As Program Director, Dr. Proctor is responsible for coordination of the Human Microbiome Project (HMP). The HMP is an eight-year, trans-NIH Common Fund Initiative to create a toolbox of resources for this emerging field. Resources developed so far include bacterial, viral, and fungal strains and their genome sequences, data gathered from these studies developed as community resources, and computational tools used to analyze these complex data sets. Dr. Proctor joined the Division of Genomic Sciences in the Extramural Research Program in 2010. Prior to this she served as Program Director at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the Geosciences and the Biosciences Directorates, where she managed microbiological, bioinformatics and research resources programs. She is formally trained in microbial ecology, was a National Science Foundation (NSF) Postdoctoral Fellow in molecular microbial genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has held appointments at Florida State University and at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Speaker Profile
Engineering Director, Google
Biography
David is an engineering director at Google, currently helping life science organizations use Google’s Cloud Platform to accelerate and scale their work with big data. His previous projects at Google include creating and leading the Google+ Platform team, overseeing the company’s developer-facing offerings, and leading product and infrastructure teams for Google Apps. Prior to joining Google in 2006, he successfully started two companies: Verity in 1988 (IPO 1995), which did full-text search, and Eloquent in 1995 (IPO 2000), which used rich media to power business communications. Eloquent was later acquired by Open Text, an enterprise software firm, where David served as CTO. David grew up in Massachusetts, where he earned a BS in physics from MIT.
