Big Data in Health Care and Biomedical Research John Quackenbush, Dana-Farber Institute and Harvard School of Public Health

Every major scientific and technological revolution in history has been driven by one thing: access to data. Today, the availability of Big Data from a wide variety of sources is transforming health and biomedical research into an information science, where discovery is fueled by our ability to effectively collect, manage, analyze, and interpret data, and where improving outcomes and controlling cost require effective use of available information. Realizing Big Data’s full potential will require that we develop new analytical methods to address a number of fundamental issues and that we develop new ways of integrating, comparing, and synthesizing information, and that we develop approaches that allow us to communicate want we learn in an intuitive and useful fashion to a variety of “consumers” each of whom has unique needs for data access. If we are successful, we have the opportunity to both dramatically improve our understanding of human disease and to implement protocols that will ultimately help to contain costs. Using concrete examples from our work, I will present some vignettes that highlight the challenges and opportunities that present themselves in today’s data rich environment in health care and biomedical research.

John Quackenbush received his PhD in 1990 in theoretical physics from UCLA working on string theory models. Following two years as a postdoctoral fellow in physics, Dr. Quackenbush applied for and received a Special Emphasis Research Career Award from the National Center for Human Research to work on the Project. He spent two years at the Salk Institute and two years at working at the interface of and computational . In 1997 he joined the faculty of The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) where his focus began to shift to understanding what was encoded within the human genome. Since joining the faculties of the Dana‐Farber Cancer Institute and the Harvard School of Public Health in 2005, his work has focused on the analysis of human cancer and pulmonary disease through the application of systems‐ based approaches with the goal of understanding and modeling biological problems.

Date: Monday 4th May 2015, 10:00–11:30am Location: John B Reid Theatre, Ground floor, AGSM Building (G27), UNSW Australia RSVP: [email protected] by 27th April 2015

Centre for Big Data Research in Health (CBDRH) | Level 1, AGSM Building (G27), UNSW Australia | cbdrh.med.unsw.edu.au UNSW CRICOS Provider Code 00098G, ABN 57 195 873 179