New Leader of Computational Biomedicine

Robert Gentleman named founding executive director of the Center for Computational Biomedicine

Robert Gentleman

Harvard Medical School has named Robert Gentleman as founding executive director of the newly established Center for Computational Biomedicine. He assumed his role on July 13.

Gentleman, an accomplished statistician and computational scientist with extensive experience in academia and industry, most recently served as vice president of computational biology at the genetic testing company 23andMe. 

The Center for Computational Biomedicine was created to harness and amplify computational and data sciences across HMS and to strengthen the connective tissue between data science efforts at the medical school, across the Harvard ecosystem, at Harvard-affiliated hospitals and in industry.

Over the last decade, data science and computation have reshaped both biomedical discovery and the practice of clinical medicine and will be increasingly important for generating insights relevant to human health. With Robert at its helm, the Center for Computational Biomedicine is greatly positioned to lead this evolution.
Isaac Kohane
DBMI Chair
I am very excited by this opportunity and the chance to return to Harvard and work with the great scientists here at HMS. Rapidly growing and increasingly complex data sets and advancing computation methods represent a challenge but also an opportunity to develop tools and interfaces that will help researchers and students reach sound, reproducible conclusions. Although not simple, these problems are solvable and their promise is great.
Robert Gentleman
Executive Director, Center for Computational Biomedicine