Jeffrey
Hammerbacher is a number cruncher — a Harvard math major to a Wall
Street quant who graduated to a key role at Facebook. Then came his
Eureka moment — the founding of a successful data start-up.
Five years ago, he was given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, a crisis that fuelled 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, Hammerbacher, 32, is on the faculty of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, with no academic training in medicine or biology. He is there because the school has begun an ambitious, well-funded initiative to apply Big Data (data science) to medicine.
Hammerbacher stood recently in front of a white board filled with an amalgam of computer and genetic code, speaking of "Linux clusters" and "gnarly C code" — standard terms in the language of computing — but the main subject was biomedical science. He also discussed "neoantigens" and "gene variants," and the data-driven hunt to find and understand the rogue cell clusters of cancer. "We're pursuing problems that are computationally and intellectually exciting, and where there is the potential to change how doctors treat patients in two or three years," Hammerbacher said.
Eric Schadt, the computational biologist who recruited Hammerbacher to Mount Sinai, says the goal is to transform medicine into an information science, where data and computing are marshalled to deliver breakthroughs in the treatment of cancer, Alzheimer's, diabetes and other chronic diseases. Mount Sinai is only one of several major medical schools turning to Big Data as a big part of the future of medicine and health care.
They are reaching out to people like Hammerbacher, whose career arc traces the evolution of data science as it has spread across the economy.
After a job designing trading models at Bear Stearns, he worked for a few important years at Facebook, where he started the social network's data team and made his reputation, and a tidy sum. Next, he was one of four founders of Cloudera, a fast-growing company that makes software tools for data science. And now he is immersed in medicine, thanks to his roots in Math and tryst with bipolar.
Hammerbacher was always a numbers guy. Rachana Fischer, a litigator in Silicon Valley, was a year ahead of him in high school. She recalls, "His career is based on analyzing people by data and numbers."
Hammerbacher's team does not do the basic science. Other researchers do that. His group works on the "computational pipeline," he said, with the goal of making personalized treatments more automated and thus more affordable and practical.
Today he speaks less about quants taking over than about their lending a hand. "We're not the most important people," he said, "but we can help."
Five years ago, he was given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, a crisis that fuelled 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, Hammerbacher, 32, is on the faculty of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, with no academic training in medicine or biology. He is there because the school has begun an ambitious, well-funded initiative to apply Big Data (data science) to medicine.
Hammerbacher stood recently in front of a white board filled with an amalgam of computer and genetic code, speaking of "Linux clusters" and "gnarly C code" — standard terms in the language of computing — but the main subject was biomedical science. He also discussed "neoantigens" and "gene variants," and the data-driven hunt to find and understand the rogue cell clusters of cancer. "We're pursuing problems that are computationally and intellectually exciting, and where there is the potential to change how doctors treat patients in two or three years," Hammerbacher said.
Eric Schadt, the computational biologist who recruited Hammerbacher to Mount Sinai, says the goal is to transform medicine into an information science, where data and computing are marshalled to deliver breakthroughs in the treatment of cancer, Alzheimer's, diabetes and other chronic diseases. Mount Sinai is only one of several major medical schools turning to Big Data as a big part of the future of medicine and health care.
They are reaching out to people like Hammerbacher, whose career arc traces the evolution of data science as it has spread across the economy.
After a job designing trading models at Bear Stearns, he worked for a few important years at Facebook, where he started the social network's data team and made his reputation, and a tidy sum. Next, he was one of four founders of Cloudera, a fast-growing company that makes software tools for data science. And now he is immersed in medicine, thanks to his roots in Math and tryst with bipolar.
Hammerbacher was always a numbers guy. Rachana Fischer, a litigator in Silicon Valley, was a year ahead of him in high school. She recalls, "His career is based on analyzing people by data and numbers."
Hammerbacher's team does not do the basic science. Other researchers do that. His group works on the "computational pipeline," he said, with the goal of making personalized treatments more automated and thus more affordable and practical.
Today he speaks less about quants taking over than about their lending a hand. "We're not the most important people," he said, "but we can help."
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