Participant-focused Research for Genetics and Drug Discovery
Date: March 2, 2017 | 4:00PM - 6:30PM
Location: Beaty Biodiversity Museum (Auditorium)
Abstract: 23andMe is a company that pioneered the direct-to-consumer genetics market and recently started offering its technology services as an end-to-end solution to researchers conducting genetic studies. With over 1,000,000 individuals genotyped, and matched with phenotype data collected from survey responses and sensors, 23andMe is leveraging this massive dataset to better understand human traits, disease, and ancestry. Dr. Gentleman will describe how 23andMe is using its participant-focused research model for doing research and how 23andMe is collaborating with scientists to further our understanding of genetics and applying it for drug discovery.
Reception sponsored by Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences.
Dr. Robert Gentleman is a distinguished data scientist and computational biologist. He is an alumnus of UBC (B.Sc., Mathematics) and holds a Ph.D., in Statistics from the University of Washington. He has been awarded the Benjamin Franklin Award, a recognition for Open Access in the Life Sciences presented by the Bioinformatics Organization and is Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). Dr. Gentleman is also one of the originators of the R programming language, a widely-used programming language software environment for statistical computing and graphics, and one of the founders of the Bioconductor Project. Dr. Gentleman was a professor at Harvard University, the University of Auckland, and the University of Waterloo; and worked at Genentech and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
