Public Biography
Atul Butte, MD, PhD is the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Distinguished Professor and inaugural Director of the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute (bchsi.ucsf.edu) at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Dr. Butte is also the Chief Data Scientist for the entire University of California Health System, the tenth largest by revenue in the United States, with 20 health professional schools, 6 medical schools, 6 academic health centers, 10 hospitals, and over 1000 care delivery sites. Dr. Butte has been continually funded by NIH for 20 years, is an inventor on 24 patents, and has authored nearly 300 publications, with research repeatedly featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Wired Magazine. Dr. Butte was elected into the National Academy of Medicine in 2015, and in 2013, he was recognized by the Obama Administration as a White House Champion of Change in Open Science for promoting science through publicly available data. Dr. Butte is also a co-founder of three investor-backed data-driven companies: Personalis (IPO, 2019), providing medical genome sequencing services, Carmenta (acquired by Progenity, 2015), discovering diagnostics for pregnancy complications, and NuMedii, finding new uses for drugs through open molecular data. Dr. Butte trained in Computer Science at Brown University, worked as a software engineer at Apple and Microsoft, received his MD at Brown University, trained in Pediatrics and Pediatric Endocrinology at Children's Hospital Boston, then received his PhD from Harvard Medical School and MIT.
Historic ACMI Biography
Dr Butte received his Bachelor of Computer Science degree and MD from Brown University, and completed his residency in Pediatrics and Fellowship in Pediatric Endocrinology, both at Children's Hospital Boston. He later matriculated at MIT where he received a Masters degree in Medical Informatics and PhD in Medical Engineering and Medical Physics. At the time of his election to the College, he was an Assistant Professor in the Medical Informatics division of the Department of Medicine at Stanford, with concurrent appointments in Pediatrics and Computer Science. Dr Butte presented his first AMIA paper in 1999 on development of knowledge discovery methods in clinical laboratory databases employing relevance networks, work that he parlayed into a subsequent publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He has been an innovative proponent of data mining of publicly available data resources, for the discovery of novel genome-phenome relationships, and the creation of genomic data-driven nosologies. Dr Butte has served on the AMIA Board of Directors and launched the first AMIA Summit on Translational Bioinformatics in 2008, which has been a resounding success. His election to the College recognizes these technical and professional service contributions.
Affiliations
The American College of Medical Informatics
ACMI is a college of elected Fellows from the U.S. and abroad who have made significant and sustained contributions to the field of medical informatics. It is the central body for a community of scholars and practitioners who are committed to advancing the informatics field.
Year Elected
2009