Atul Butte, MD, PhD, is the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Distinguished Professor and inaugural director of the Institute of Computational Health Sciences (ichs.ucsf.edu) at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Dr. Butte is also the executive director for Clinical Informatics across the six University of California medical schools and medical centers. Dr. Butte has authored over 200 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 an Open Science Champion of Change for promoting science through publicly available data.
Dr. Butte is a founder of three investor-backed data-driven companies: Personalis, providing medical genome sequencing services, Carmenta (acquired by Progenity), discovering diagnostics for pregnancy complications, and NuMedii, finding new uses for drugs through open molecular data. Dr. Butte is a principal investigator of three major programs: the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine; ImmPort, the clinical and molecular data repository for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; and the California Precision Medicine Consortium, helping recruit tens of thousands of participants into President Obama's Precision Medicine Initiative.
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, and then received his PhD from Harvard Medical School and MIT.
