The University of California at San Francisco has appointed Dr. Atul Butte to lead its new Institute for Computational Health Sciences.
Butte, 45, will also become executive director of clinical informatics for University of California Health Sciences and Services, where he'll help the UC system implement a data warehouse and analytic platform. His appointment is effective April 1.
An expert in pediatrics and medical informatics, Butte comes to UCSF from Stanford University, where he is chief of the systems medicine division and an associate professor of pediatrics. He's also been a faculty member at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital for the last 10 years. His Stanford lab, which focuses on using big data to create new diagnostic tools and therapeutic solutions, is funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the March of Dimes, the Whites Plains, N.Y.-based not-for-profit focused on premature delivery.
Butte also previously worked as a software engineer at Microsoft Corp. and Apple, and has founded several Bay Area biotech startups.
Under Butte's leadership, UCSF hopes the institute will serve as a hub for computer scientists and researchers who want to use big data and computation in biomedical research and practice while also educating Stanford students. The center is a part of an increased focus on precision medicine—the use of data to personalize an individual's treatment—across UCSF's dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacy schools.
President Barack Obama announced his own precision medicine initiative during the State of the Union speech Tuesday evening, though what the federal effort will entail is still unclear. "I want the country that eliminated polio and mapped the human genome to deliver a new era of medicine, one that delivers the right treatment at the right time," Obama said.
Butte will make a base salary of $147,300, and is eligible for an additional $332,700 in negotiated salary through philanthropic sources and grants.
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