UC San Francisco researcher and campus leader Atul Butte, MD, PhD, has been recognized for his outstanding career in the computational and health sciences with induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the most prestigious and oldest honor societies in the U.S.
Butte is a renowned biomedical and bioinformatics scientist who has spent his career applying computation to some of the most pressing challenges in disease diagnosis, therapeutics, and biomedicine.
He is the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics, Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, and Epidemiology and Biostatistics at UCSF, inaugural director of the UCSF Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute, and chief data scientist at the University of California Health System (UC Health).
Butte was recognized by the Obama Administration as a White House Champion of Change in Open Science in 2013 for promoting science through publicly available data. And he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2015.
Butte is an inventor on 24 patents and a co-founder of three companies: Personalis, which provides medical genome sequencing services; Carmenta, which was acquired by Progenity and develops diagnostics for pregnancy complications; and NuMedii, which hunts for new uses for existing drugs within open-access molecular data.
Founded in 1780, the academy has continuously elected leaders and innovators from across disciplines who demonstrate excellence in their field that advances the interests of the nation. Its founders included John Adams and John Hancock, and its first members included Benjamin Franklin and George Washington.
The nearly 250 new members of the academy include actor Danny Glover, journalist and activist Gloria Steinem, and news anchor Anderson Cooper.