Russ Altman


Russ Biagio Altman is an American professor of bioengineering, genetics, medicine, and biomedical data science and past chairman of the bioengineering department at Stanford University.

Education

Altman holds an A.B. from Harvard College in 1983, a Ph.D. in medical information sciences from Stanford in 1989 and M.D. from Stanford Medical School in 1990.
After his internship at Stanford, he became board certified in 1991 in internal medicine and in clinical informatics in 2014. After a year of post-doctoral research, he joined the faculty as assistant professor in 1992. He became full professor in 2004, and was chair of the department of bioengineering from 2007 to June 2012.
He currently is the Kenneth Fong Professor of Engineering at Stanford, and an advisor to the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub.

Research and career

His primary research interests are in the application of computing and informatics technologies to problems relevant to medicine. He is particularly interested in methods for understanding drug action at molecular, cellular, organism and population levels. His lab studies how human genetic variation impacts drug response, helping start the PharmGKB project in 2000.
Other work focuses on the analysis of biological molecules to understand the actions, interactions and adverse events of drugs, publishing a database called FEATURE in 2003.
He helps lead an FDA-supported center for regulatory science and innovation.
He chaired the Science Board advising the FDA Commissioner, serves on the NIH director’s advisory committee, and is co-chair of the IOM Drug Forum. He is an organizer of the annual Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing.
He co-founded Personalis, Inc. in 2011 along with three other faculty members including Euan Ashley, Atul Butte, Michael Snyder and businessman John West.
In 2017, he started hosting a show on SiriusXM titled "The Future of Everything". He is clinically active with a pharmacogenomics consultative service at Stanford Healthcare.

Awards and honors

Altman received the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians, the American College of Medical Informatics, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine of the National Academies. He was president, founding board member, and a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology, and-president of the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics from March 2013 to 2014.
He received the Stanford Medical School graduate teaching award in 2000, and mentorship award in 2014.
In 2018, Altman was awarded the ISCB Outstanding Contributions Award.