CRCS Lunch Seminar

Date: Monday, April 7, 2014
Time: 1:00pm – 2:30pm
Place: 60 Oxford St., Room 330

Speaker: Alexander (Sasha) Wait Zaranek, PhD., Chief Scientist, Curoverse Inc., Director Informatics, Personal Genome Project, Harvard Medical School

Title: Transparent Informatics Can Revolutionize Medicine

Abstract:
Rapid improvements in DNA sequencing and synthesis could usher in a new era of precision medicine. The Personal Genome Project is building a transparent and public resource consisting of genomes, detailed phenotypes, software, as well as cell-lines and other tissue samples for more than 100,000 individuals. However, the effort to address computational and storage needs created by genomic and other types of molecular data are not well served by a fragmented landscape of homegrown solutions and proprietary technologies. An open-source foundation can help coordinate the efforts of stakeholders around open biomedical infrastructure.  The open data, interactive applications and cloud infrastructure developed at the PGP can provide the initial seed for the initiative.

Bio:
Alexander (Sasha) Wait Zaranek, PhD is a founder and the Director of Informatics at the Harvard Personal Genome Project (PGP). Sasha works on open technologies that are part of the revolution that reduced human DNA sequencing costs by a million-fold since the completion of the Human Genome Project. A current research focus is the development of clinical-quality applications for processing massive data sets spanning millions of individuals across collaborating organizations, eventually encompassing exabytes of data. His contributions have led to highly cited publications in Science, Nature, the Lancet and other leading scientific journals. Sasha is also a founder of and shareholder in Curoverse, an early stage company providing commercial support for the open-source biomedical big-data platform he designed for the PGP.