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On the Case at Mount Sinai, It’s Dr. Data

  • (March 07, 2015)

Jeffrey Hammerbacher is a number cruncher — a Harvard math major who went from a job as a Wall Street quant to a key role at Facebook to a founder of a successful data start-up. But five years ago, he was given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, a crisis that fueled in him a fierce curiosity in medicine — about how the body and brain work and why they sometimes fail. The more he read and talked to experts, the more he became convinced that medicine needed people like him: skilled practitioners of data science who could guide scientific discovery and decision-making. Now Mr. Hammerbacher, 32, is on the faculty of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, despite the fact that he has no academic training in medicine or biology. He is there because the school has begun an ambitious, well-funded initiative to apply data science to medicine. Eric Schadt, the computational biologist who recruited Mr. Hammerbacher to Mount Sinai, says the goal is to transform medicine into an information science, where data and computing are marshaled to deliver breakthroughs in the treatment of cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes and other chronic diseases.

-Jeff Hammerbacher, Assistant Professor, Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
- Dr. Eric Schadt, Professor, Chair, Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Director Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology

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Additional Coverage:
The Times of India via The New York Times

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