Russ B. Altman

Administrative Appointments

• Chairman, Department of Bioengineering (2007 - present)
• Director, Biomedical Informatics Training Program (2000 - present)
• Member, Biomedical Library and Informatics Research Commitee Study Section (NIH) (2002 - 2005)
• President, International Society for Computational Biology (2000 - 2001)

Honors and Awards

• Fellow, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (2007)
• Fellow, American College of Physicians (1998)
• U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists & Engineers, NIH (1997)
• Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (1991)
• Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching, Stanford Medical School (2000)

Professional Education

Postdoctoral Advisees

Dorit Berlin, Emidio Capriotti, Samuel Flores, Laura Hodges, Kai Kohlhoff, Wei-Nchih Lee, Tianyun Liu, Victoria Nembaware

Graduate & Fellowship Program Affiliations

• Biomedical Informatics
• Biophysics
• Genetics
• Bioengineering

Community & International Work

• Attending Physician, Medicine, Menlo Park, CA 

Web Site Links

• Home Page

Research Interests

I am interested in the application of computational technologies to problems in molecular biology of relevance to medicine. In particular, my laboratory focuses on three areas. First, we are interested in building structured information repositories to support biological research. Our first effort was the RiboWEB resource for supporting studies of the bacterial ribosome (http://riboweb.stanford.edu). Our latest effort is in the creation of a comprehensive pharmacogenomics knowledge base (http://www.pharmgkb.org/) that provides access to information relating genotype to phenotype (in particular, how variation in genetics leads to variation in response to drugs). Second, we are interested in the elucidation and analysis of three dimensional structures. We have projects for computing 3D molecular structures from sparse and noisy data, and for analyzing these structures to recognize and annotate active sites. We are interested in physics-based simulation of biological structures (http://simbios.stanford.edu/). Third, we are interested in computational methods for analyzing functional genomics information. We are focusing on the use of natural language processing techniques for extracting and summarizing information, and in the development of novel methods for analyzing microarray expression data. We are applying these technologies to the study of functional genomics.

Publications

• Coarse-grained modeling of large RNA molecules with knowledge-based potentials and structural filters. Jonikas MA, Radmer RJ, Laederach A, Das R, Pearlman S, Herschlag D, Altman RB. RNA. 2009; 15 (2): 189-99
• Improving structure-based function prediction using molecular dynamics. Glazer DS, Radmer RJ, Altman RB. Structure. 2009; 17 (7): 919-29
• Estimation of the warfarin dose with clinical and pharmacogenetic data. Klein TE, Altman RB, Eriksson N, Gage BF, Kimmel SE, Lee MT, Limdi NA, Page D, Roden DM, Wagner MJ, Caldwell MD, Johnson JA. N Engl J Med. 2009; 360 (8): 753-64
• Generating genome-scale candidate gene lists for pharmacogenomics. Hansen NT, Brunak S, Altman RB. Clin Pharmacol Ther. 2009; 86 (2): 183-9
• Direct-to-consumer genetic testing: failure is not an option. Altman RB, Clin Pharmacol Ther. 2009; 86 (1): 15-7