Atul Butte, MD, PhD

“Data is power. Data is revolution. Data is frozen knowledge, and you and I can bring the heat, the light, and the energy to melt that data and let out the knowledge, let it free.”

Atul Butte, MD, PhD, is the Chief Data Scientist for the University of California Health System comprising 17 health professional schools, 6 medical centers, and 10 hospitals. He is also the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics and inaugural Director of the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

Dr. Butte builds and uses translational bioinformatic tools to harness trillions of molecular, clinical, and epidemiological data points for application in cancer drug discovery, diagnostics, electronic medical records, and healthcare. Prior to joining UCSF, he was the Chief of the Division of Systems Medicine and Associate Professor of Pediatrics and by courtesy, Computer Science and Immunology and Rheumatology at Stanford University.

Having authored over 200 publications, Dr. Butte was elected into the National Academy of Medicine and recognized by the Obama Administration as a White House Champion of Change in Open Science for promoting science through publicly available data. He co-authored Microarrays for an Integrative Genomics, one of the first books on microarray analysis.

Dr. Butte is a founder of three investor-backed data-driven companies: Personalis, providing medical genome sequencing services, Carmenta (acquired by Progenity), discovering diagnostics for pregnancy complications, and NuMedii, finding new uses for drugs through open molecular data. He is a principal investigator of the major programs the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine, implementing Governor Brown’s vision to promote precision medicine in California, and ImmPort, the clinical and molecular data repository for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Dr. Butte received his B.A. in computer science from Brown University, his M.D. from Brown University, and his Ph.D. from Harvard Medical School and MIT. He has worked as a software engineer at Apple and Microsoft and trained in pediatrics and pediatric endocrinology at Boston Children’s Hospital.