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The Genomics Revolution: Personalized Medicine

David Heckerman gives a talk

David Heckerman tells us how the genomic revolution can guide medicines and treatments to be personalized to our individual genomes.

Currently the founding director of the e-Science group at Microsoft Research, David was a student of Ross Schachter’s. David earned his PhD and MD from Stanford during the 90s. His PhD dissertation on medical informatics, done under Ron Howard, won awards from the Decision Analysis Society and from the ACM. His team at Microsoft Research does computationally intensive research for a vaccination for HIV and for genetic causes of disease.

Speaking in the New Directions speaker series, David Heckerman interested listeners on how the genomics revolution was brought about by a huge drop in the cost of per genome decoding.  A little over a decade ago, the first human genome was sequenced at a cost of about one-hundred million dollars. Today, it costs well under ten thousand dollars. In fact, the cost is dropping much more quickly than the rate of Moore’s law. As a result, genomics data is becoming widely available and widely used.  David Heckerman discusses elements of this genomics revolution relevant to Management Science and Engineering, including probabilistic modeling for the identification of genetic causes of disease. He also touches on legal and ethical issues surrounding this revolution.

Watch David’s talk, a New Directions speaker video