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Key Documents

Atul Butte

Contact Information

  • Academic Offices
    Personal Information
    Email abutte@stanford.edu Tel (650) 723-3465
    Administrative Contact
    Susan Aptekar Administrative Associate Tel Work (650) 725-1337

Administrative Appointments

  • Associate Director, CTSA Translational Informatics Program, Stanford Center for Clinical and Translational Education and Research , (2008– present )
  • Director, Biomedical Informatics Scholarly Area , (2007– present )
  • Board of Directors, American Medical Informatics Association , (2007– present )
  • Scientific Program Committee, American Medical Informatics Association , (2007– 2007 )
  • Study Section Reviewer, NIH Biomedical Computing and Health Informatics Study Section , (2005– 2009 )
  • Scientific Program Committee, American Medical Informatics Association , (2005– 2005 )
  • Study Section Reviewer, Special Emphasis Panel, National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute , (2002– 2002 )
  • Study Section Reviewer, Special Emphasis Panel reviewing Planning Grants, NIH National Programs of Excellence in Biomedical Computing , (2001– 2002 )
  • Scientific Program Committee, American Medical Informatics Association , (2000– 2002 )
  • Informatics Committee Member, National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute Program of Genomic Applications , (2000– 2003 )
  • Scientific Advisor, Genstruct Inc. , (2001– present )

Honors and Awards

  • Elected Fellow, American College of Medical Informatics (2009)
  • New Investigator Award, American Medical Informatics Association (2008)
  • Tomorrow's Principal Investigator, Genome Technology Magazine (2007)
  • HHMI Physician-Scientist Early Career Award, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (2006-2011)
  • Research Starter Grant in Informatics, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America Foundation (2006-2008)
  • Outstanding Speaker Award, American Association for Clinical Chemistry (2003)
  • Pathology Residents' Choice Award, Emory University School of Medicine (2003)
  • Outstanding Speaker Award, American Association for Clinical Chemistry (2002)
  • Travel Grant Award for exceptional research presented at the 84th Annual Meeting, The Endocrine Society (2002)
  • Scholar-In-Training Award, American Association for Cancer Research and Pharmacia (2001)
  • Clinical Scholar Award, Lawson Wilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society and NovoNordisk (2001)
  • Best Paper Finalist, American Medical Informatics Association (2000)
  • Fellow, Merck and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2000)
  • Best Student Paper, Third Place, American Medical Informatics Association (2000)
  • Farley Fellow, Children's Hospital, Boston (1999)
  • Associate member, Sigma Xi (1995)
  • Research Training Fellowship for Medical Students, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (1994)
  • Research Scholars Program, Howard Hughes Medical Institute / National Institutes of Health (1993)
  • Eagle Scout, Boy Scouts of America (1984)

Professional Education

  • Ph.D., HST: MIT and Harvard Medical School Health Sciences and Technology (2004)
  • M.S., MIT Medical Informatics (2002)
  • Fellowship, Children's Hospital Boston Pediatric Endocrinology (2001)
  • Residency, Children's Hospital Boston Pediatrics (1998)
  • M.D., Brown Univ. School of Medicine (1995)
  • M.S., Brown Univ. School of Medicine Medical Science (1995)
  • B.A. Honors, Brown University Computer Science (1991)

Industry Relationships

Stanford is committed to ethical and transparent interactions with our industry partners. It is our policy to disclose payments of $5,000 or more, equity valued at $5,000 or more in a publicly traded company, or any equity in a privately held company, to physicians and scientists employed by Stanford University from companies or other commercial entities with which they interact as part of their professional activities. 

  • Consulting: Genstruct, Johnson and Johnson, Siemens
  • Equity: Genstruct, Numedii

Current Research Interests

Translational bioinformatics has been defined as the development of analytic, storage, and interpretive methods to optimize the transformation of increasingly voluminous genomic and biological data into diagnostics and therapeutics for the clinician. The long-term research goal of the Butte Lab is to develop translational bioinformatics methods to reason over many available genome-scale measurement and experimental modalities, and apply these methods to study complex disorders in genomic medicine, especially obesity and type 2 diabetes mellitus.

Dr. Butte's laboratory focuses on solving problems relevant to genomic medicine by developing new methodologies in translational bioinformatics. The Butte Lab currently has been funded by HHMI and under five NIH grants. The Butte Lab has developed bioinformatics methods to take genomic, genetic, phenotypic, and RNAi data from multiple sources and phenotypes and reason over these data. Example of this method include our work on cancer drug discovery published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (2000), on type 2 diabetes mellitus published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (2003), on fat cell formation published in Nature Cell Biology (2005), on obesity in Bioinformatics (2007), and in transplantation published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (2009). To facilitate this, the Butte Lab has developed tools to automatically index and find genomic data sets based on the phenotypic and contextual details of each experiment, published in Nature Biotechnology (2006), and in re-mapping microarray data, published in Nature Methods (2007). The Butte Lab has also been developing novel methods in comparing clinical data from electronic health record systems with gene expression data, as described in Science (2008).

Publications