April 11, 2018

Leading health technology experts to headline Purdue’s Data Science in Life Sciences symposium

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Four leading experts in health technology will highlight a Data Science in the Life Sciences Symposium on April 20 in the Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship.

Sponsored by Life Sciences at Purdue University, the free, all-day event will include presentations by:

• Mick Keyes, formerly chief technologist with Hewlett Packard Enterprises.

• Todd Michael, professor and director of bioinformatics at the J. Craig Venter Institute.

• Eric Stahlberg, director of high-performance computing at the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, sponsored by the National Cancer Institute.

• Casimir Starsiak III, strategy and business operations lead for the Google spinoff Verily Life Sciences.

Seating for the workshop is limited. Register via Eventbrite by Tuesday (April 17).

The symposium, designed for Purdue’s research community, will focus on the coming Fifth Industrial Revolution, also known as the 5th IR, says Catherine Hill, who is organizing the event.

“Every industrial revolution to date has been defined by the ability of machinery to monumentally change society,” says Hill, a professor of entomology and a Showalter Faculty Scholar at Purdue. “The 5th IR will be faster and more scalable than anything we’ve ever seen before, providing us with new technologies to,  among other things, diagnose, understand and treat illness. However, these advances are dependent upon scientists’ abilities to unravel and harness data from complex biological systems, and that’s what our speakers will be discussing that day.”

Suresh Garimella, executive vice president for research and partnerships and the R. Eugene and Susie E. Goodson Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering, adds that the symposium will align two strategic research initiatives underway at Purdue – life sciences research and data science.

“Bringing together Purdue’s data scientists and life scientists to learn from some of the best minds in the health technology arena is a critical first step forward together. Instead of waiting to see what the future has in store for us, we will be a part of the transformation.” 

Keyes is an independent adviser specializing in sensor- and analytic-based technologies for the food, agriculture and life science industries. With more than 20 years of industry experience, including with Hewlett Packard Enterprises, Keyes has worked on several pharma and food traceability government-led initiatives around the world and is a keen advocate of the potential of personalized services.

Michael heads up a group at the J. Craig Venter Institute focused on the data structures required for reading and writing genomes. Previously, he led efforts at Abbott Laboratories and Monsanto to leverage rich, multi-omic datasets to predict phenotypic outcomes from genomic features.

Stahlberg currently leads high-performance computing at the Frederick National Laboratory, working with  the National Cancer Institute Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology. Since 2014, he has been fostering collaborations between the National Cancer Institute and the U.S. Department of Energy on extreme-scale computing in cancer applications.

Starsiak, who has a bachelor’s degree from Purdue in industrial engineering and a master’s from Stanford University in management science and engineering, spent five years on Google’s Business Operations and Strategy team before joining Verily in 2015. Formerly known as Google Life Sciences, Verily is developing tools to collect and organize health data, using the findings to create interventions and platforms for more holistic care management.

For more information, contact Stephanie Winder at winder@purdue.edu or 765-496-0364. 

Writer: Angie Roberts, akroberts@purdue.edu 

Source: Kaethe Beck, kaethe@purdue.edu

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