Teri Klein, PhD

Teri Klein is a Senior Research Scientist at Stanford University and Project Director of the PharmGKB, a national resource for pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics data funded by the National Institutes of Health. She is also an Associate Adjunct Pro-fessor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco. She received a BA degree with honors in chemistry/biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a PhD in medical information sciences from the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Klein moved to Stanford University in 2000 after 14 years on the faculty at University of California, San Francisco in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and at the Computer Graphics Laboratory. Her interests include bioinformatics for support of pharmacogenomics as well as molecular modeling to affect clinical disease syndromes with a structural basis, such as collagen-based diseases like Ehlers-Danlos and osteogenesis imperfecta. She is also interested in modeling the three-dimensional effects of human genetic polymorphisms, particularly those with implications for pharmacogenomics. She is now directing an informatics effort to construct a comprehensive knowledge base linking genomic, laboratory, and clinical data for the purposes of understanding how variation in human genes is correlated with variation in response to medications. As such, this knowledge base poses problems in both clinical informatics and bioinformatics, at their intersection. Dr. Klein is a founding organizer of the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing, an annual meeting for biocomputation that is now in its seventh year and attracts roughly 400 attendees each year. This meeting is one of three important meetings in bioinformatics and has hosted sessions designed to bridge clinical informatics and bioinformatics, including sessions on physiologic modeling, visualization and interfaces, and human genetic variation. Dr. Klein is also the Treasurer of the International Society for Computational Biology, an organization devoted to bioinformatics and one whose mission is closely related to that of AMIA. Finally, Dr. Klein recently served on a special panel convened by NIH/National Center for Research Resources to advise the NCRR on ways in which it could participate in the new informatics initiatives being developed at NIH in response to the Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative report.