CCST Adds New Council Member, Senior Fellows

Atul Butte, M.D., Ph.D., is the newest CCST Council Member.

At the February Council meeting, CCST announced its changes in membership for the new year, with Atul J. Butte, M.D., Ph.D. Associate Professor of Medicine (Biomedical Informatics) and Pediatrics at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research joining the Council.

"We are pleased to welcome Atul to the Council," said CCST Council Chair Miriam John. "His research is at the nexus of information technology and advanced medical diagnostics and therapeutics - areas that contribute to both the intellectual and economic vibrancy of the state of California. In combining state-of-the-art approaches from both domains, Atul is helping to create yet another new technical leap forward."

Butte's laboratory focuses on solving problems relevant to genomic medicine by developing new methodologies in translational bioinformatics - computer related activities designed to extract clinically actionable information from very large datasets. The field has grown from a need to develop computational methods to work with continually increasing amounts of data.

As part of the Council, Butte joins an assembly of corporate CEOs, academicians, scientists and scholars of the highest distinction. Council members may serve up to two terms of three years each. This year saw one Council member step down after serving six years, David W. Martin, Jr., M.D., who is chairman and CEO of AvidBiotics Corporation, a biotechnology company in San Francisco. Three other Council members agreed to begin a second term: Soroosh Sorooshian, Director of the Center for Hydrometeorology and Remote Sensing at UC Irvine; Pete Worden, Director of the NASA Ames Research Center; and Kathy Yelick, Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Science at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

CCST also welcomed eight people to the ranks of its Senior Fellows, including outgoing Council member David Martin. CCST Senior Fellows work with the Council to provide politically neutral, expert advice and solutions to science and technology-related public policy issues and initiatives. There are currently 131 Senior Fellows, who provide input and expertise into many CCST projects and initiatives.

"Our Senior Fellows have distinguished themselves as Council members and/or significant project contributors," said John. "They comprise a rich resource of the state's most accomplished technical talent to draw upon in addressing issues in a timely and expert manner."

The new CCST Senior Fellows in addition to Martin are: