David Haussler: Blockchain at The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health

The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (http://genomicsandhealth.org): How we are Using the Blockchain

The world needs to share data on genetic variants and their relation to human health if we are ever to learn to perform truly precision medicine. I'll describe our efforts to organize this sharing activity at a global scale, and how blockchain technologies might fit in.

David Haussler, Ph.D. (https://genomics.soe.ucsc.edu/haussler/bio)

Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Distinguished Professor, Biomolecular Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz

Scientific Director, UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute, University of California, Santa Cruz

Director, UCSC Cancer Genomics Hub, University of California, Santa Cruz

Scientific Co-Director, California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3)

David Haussler develops new statistical and algorithmic methods to explore the molecular function, evolution, and disease process in the human genome, integrating comparative and high-throughput genomics data to study gene structure, function, and regulation. He is credited with pioneering the use in genomics of hidden Markov models (HMMs), stochastic context-free grammars, and discriminative kernel methods. As a collaborator on the international Human Genome Project, his team posted the first publicly available computational assembly of the human genome sequence on the Internet on July 7, 2000. His team subsequently developed the UCSC Genome Browser, a web-based tool that is used extensively in biomedical research andserves, along with the Ensembl platform, virtually all large-scale vertebrate genomics projects, including NHGRI’s ENCODE project, the 1000 Genomes Project, and NCI’s TCGA project. He built the CGHub database to hold NCI’s cancer genome data, co-founded the Genome 10K project so science can learn from other vertebrate genomes, co-founded the Treehouse Childhood Cancer Project to enable international comparison of childhood cancer genomes, and is a co-founder of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH), a coalition of the top research, health care, and disease advocacy organizations that have taken the first steps to standardize and enable secure sharing of genomic and clinical data.

Haussler received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of AAAS and AAAI. He has won a number of awards, including the 2015 Dan David Prize. 2011 Weldon Memorial prize for application of mathematics and statistics to biology, 2009 ASHG Curt Stern Award in Human Genetics, the 2008 Senior Scientist Accomplishment Award from the International Society for Computational Biology, the 2006 Dickson Prize for Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and the 2003 ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award in Artificial Intelligence.

Tentative Agenda:

6:30 to 7:00 Informal networking.

7:00 to 8:00 David Haussler, Ph.D.

8:00 to 8:30 Q & A, informal networking