Big Data in Biomedicine Conference set for May 25-26

The 2016 Big Data in Biomedicine Conference, set for May 25-26 at the School of Medicine, will focus on advancing precision health by harnessing data from electronic health records, biomedical databases and wearable sensors.

“We are once again thrilled to welcome experts from around the world to our annual Big Data in Biomedicine Conference, where we will continue to work together to advance our vision for precision health — through which we are using big data to anticipate and prevent disease in the healthy and precisely diagnose and treat disease in the ill,” said Lloyd Minor, MD, dean of the School of Medicine, who will give introductory remarks at the conference.

The two-day event is expected to draw hundreds of researchers and leaders from academia, health care, government and industry. More than 40 presenters will discuss ways to deploy data analysis and technology in a range of fields, including genomics, cancer, pharmacovigilance, population health, biobanks, microbiota, statistics, machine learning, digital health, and learning health systems.

The annual conference debuted in 2013, thanks to a grant from the Li Ka Shing Foundation. Last year’s event brought nearly 500 attendees to the campus, while another 3,000 watched online via live-streamed video.

Among this year’s speakers will be Kathy Hudson, PhD, deputy director for science, outreach and policy at National Institutes of Health; Robert Califf, MD, commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration; Blake Byers, PhD, general partner at Google Ventures; Shahar Shpigelman, big data analytics manager at Intel; Carlos Bustamante, PhD, professor and chair of biomedical data science and professor of genetics at Stanford; Jody Heymann, MD, PhD, dean of the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA; and Steve Lohr, a New York Times reporter and author of Data-ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else.

The 2016 conference is part of Stanford Medicine’s Biomedical Data Science Initiative, which strives to make powerful transformations in human health and scientific discovery by fostering innovative collaborations among medical researchers, computer scientists, statisticians and physicians.

To learn more and to register for the conference, please visit http://bigdata.stanford.edu.