Perakslis, Mesirov and Leach Named Bio-IT World Expo 2012 Keynotes
By Bio-IT World Staff
November 17, 2011 | Bio-IT World has announced the three keynote speakers for the 10th anniversary Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, which will be held in Boston next April 24-26, 2012.
The keynoters will be:
Eric Perakslis, CIO, U.S. Food and Drug Administration;
Martin Leach, CIO, Broad Institute & Jill Mesirov, Associate Director and Chief Informatics Officer; Director, Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Broad Institute.
Perakslis is the newly appointed CIO and Chief Scientist (Informatics) at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, where he has responsibility for modernizing the IT and in silico scientific capabilities at FDA. He will speak on the morning of April 25.
The opening keynote session on April 24 will be a joint presentation featuring Martin Leach and Jill Mesirov, the Chief Information and Chief Informatics Officers at the Broad, respectively.
Commented Bio-IT World Editor-in-Chief Kevin Davies: “Over the past decade, we’ve been honored to host some impressive keynote speakers to headline the Bio-IT World Conference, including Ray Kurzweil, Stephen Wolfram, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Craig Venter, John Halamka and current NIH director Francis Collins. We’re delighted to offer Eric Perakslis this high-profile forum to publicly share his vision for FDA.”
“We’re also excited that two informatics luminaries from the Broad Institute – Jill Mesirov and Martin Leach – will share the very same stage where the Broad’s director, Eric Lander, kicked off the inaugural Bio-IT World Expo back in 2002. As the Broad plans to literally double its size in the next couple of years, Martin and Jill will offer a fascinating glimpse at how they are harnessing the latest innovations in informatics and IT to harness the data deluge and further biomedical research,” said Davies.
Before joining FDA, Eric Perakslis was senior VP of R&D Information Technology at Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceuticals R&D, where among other achievements, he spearheaded the development of the tranSMART knowledge mart (a 2010 Bio-IT World Best Practices award winner). Eric was previously group leader of scientific computing at ArQule and he began his professional career with the Army Corps of Engineers. Eric served for two years as the volunteer CIO of the King Hussein Institute for Biotechnology and Cancer in Jordan, and has worked extensively with the Lance Armstrong Foundation (he is a kidney cancer survivor). Personal interests include sailboat racing, marathons and running the family winery.
Martin Leach is CIO at the Broad Institute, where he oversees the institute’s multi-faceted computing and IT-related endeavors. Martin was previously at Merck & Co., where he led IT for Discovery and Pre-Clinical Sciences across North America. He previously spent almost a decade providing support and strategic vision for IT and bioinformatics at Curagen and 454 Life Sciences, among other organizations.
Jill Mesirov is associate director and chief informatics officer at the Broad Institute, where she directs computational biology and bioinformatics. She previously managed computational biology and bioinformatics in IBM’s Healthcare/Pharmaceutical Solutions Organization, and before that was director of research at Thinking Machines Corp. Jill is director of the International Society for Computational Biology and former president of the Association for Women in Mathematics.
A third plenary session will feature a roundtable panel discussion on advances in cancer diagnostics, informatics and therapeutics, in which a group of cancer research luminaries will discuss the current state of translational cancer research, targeted therapies and clinical trials. “Our plenary panel discussion will feature some of our most innovative cancer researchers talking about the state of cancer research and diagnostics, translational medicine, and clinical trials. It should be a fascinating session,” commented Davies. Those speakers will be announced shortly.
For more information on the 2012 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, visit the event website at www.bio-itworldexpo.com.