Faculty & Research

personnel profile

Russ B. Altman

 
Title:Professor; Chair, Bioengineering
Department(s):Bioengineering
Affiliation(s):Chair, Bioengineering; Principal Investigator, Simbios
Location:Clark Center, S170
Mail Code:5444
Phone:650.725.3394       650.725.0659
Fax:650.723.8544
E-mail: russ.altman@stanford.edu
URL: http://www-helix.stanford.edu/people/altman/
http://www-helix.stanford.edu/
Administrator: Tiffany Murray

Research Statement

Altman's primary interests are in the application of computing technologies to basic molecular biological problems, now referred to as bioinformatics. He is particularly interested in the analysis of protein and RNA structure and function, both in an individual problem-centered manner and on a functional genomic scale. He has an interest in applying systems biology concepts to pharmacology and personalized medicine. His core initial work was the development of probabilistic algorithms for the determination of protein structure from sparse and uncertain experimental data. These algorithms have been shown to have some advantages over other methods of structure determination including the ability to calculate not only a protein conformation, but also an explicit estimate of the uncertainty in the position of each atom. His current efforts are in three areas. First, he is interested in techniques for representing biological knowledge (not just data) for automatic scientific computation. His group is working on representing the contents of the scientific literature for pharmacogenomics (http://www.pharmgkb.org/) in order to support the task of building robust models of biological systems. As part of this work, the group is also interested in novel user interfaces to biological data, and computational architectures for knowledge environments. Second, he is interested in the analysis of microenvironments within macromolecules. In particular, his group is developing methods for statistically analyzing related structures to infer the key conserved features that distinguish these structures from unrelated structures. This work has implications for the recognition of functional sites in proteins, for protein engineering, and for drug design (http://feature.stanford.edu/). Finally, he is interested in physics-based simulation of biological structures, particularly RNA and proteins. Within this broad area, our focus has been on creating coarse-grain representations of RNA, and on combining machine learning and informatics methods with simulation to maximize the performance of each (http://simbios.stanford.edu/).

Degree Discipline Year School
MD Medicinr 1990 Stanford School of Medicine
PhD Medical Information Sciences 1989 Stanford School of Medicine
Publication TitleAuthor(s)/Speaker(s)Open Document
Predicting drug side-effects by chemical systems biology Tatonetti NP, Liu T, Altman RB
Generating genome-scale candidate gene lists for pharmacogenomics Hansen NT, Brunak S, Altman RB
Improving structure-based function prediction using molecular dynamics Glazer DS, Radmer RJ, Altman RB
Direct-to-consumer genetic testing: failure is not an option Altman RB
Pharmspresso: a text mining tool for extraction of pharmacogenomic concepts and relationships from full text Garten Y, Altman RB
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Academic Honors & Awards

U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists & Engineers NIH 1997

Post-Doctoral Fellowship Howard Hughes Medical Institute 1991

Fellow American College of Medical Informatics 1998

Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching Stanford Medical School 2000

Fellow American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering 2007

Member, Institute of Medicine of National Academies, 2009