DREAM Directors & Support Team

Dr. Boutros received his BSc in Chemistry from the University of Waterloo in 2004 and his PhD in Medical Biophysics from the University of Toronto in 2009. He then joined the University of Toronto as faculty, building a research program focused on developing and benchmarking methods in cancer genomics. In 2018 Dr. Boutros joined the University of California, Los Angeles as Director of Cancer Data Science at the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and Associate Director Cancer Genomics at the Institute for Precision Health. Dr. Boutros became a DREAM Director in 2016, and in 2021 became the DREAM Chair.

Dr. Stolovitzky is the founder of the DREAM Challenges and currently serves as Chair Emeritus and Director in DREAM’s Board. Until December 2023 he was the Chief Science Officer at GeneDx. From 1998 to 2021 Gustavo was a research scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, where he was the founding Chair of the Exploratory Life Sciences Council and previously the Program Director of the Translational Systems Biology and Nanobiotechnology Program among other roles. He was an Adjunct Professor at the Genetics and Genomics Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai where he led a research group working on exosomal transcriptomics, the study of drug combinations and machine learning. Currently he is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University. His research interests include the use of crowdsourcing for biomedical research, machine learning, the analysis of high-throughput biological data, the mathematical modeling of biological processes, and the use of nanotechnology for biomedical applications in diagnostics.

Dr. Albrecht is Director of Challenges and Benchmarking at Sage Bionetworks where he is responsible for overseeing challenge execution and developing new capabilities for the data challenge community. He has a PhD in chemical engineering from MIT. Prior to joining Sage in 2021, he worked to enable pre-competitive pharmaceutical data science collaborations and promote the adoption of modern machine learning capabilities within industry.

Ms. Blaese is a Healthcare and Life Sciences Project Manager at IBM Research and is responsible for managing numerous NIH grants and research consortia. She has a MBA from University of North Carolina and has a background in managing large bioinformatics and computational biology projects. She has been providing project management support for the DREAM Challenges since 2012.

Dr. Bletz is a Senior Research Scientist in the computational oncology group at Sage Bionetworks and is responsible for managing data and resource coordination for multiple interdisciplinary NCI-funded consortia. She has a PhD in genetics from Stanford University and an extensive background in molecular approaches to understand the genetic basis for human disease. She has been providing operational support for DREAM Challenges since 2017.

Dr. Kyle Ellrott is an Associate Professor at the Knight Cancer Research Institute at Oregon Health and Science University where his primary focus has been cancer genomics, data science and machine learning. Coming from a background in computer science, he received his PhD in Life Science from The University of Tennessee and worked on protein structure prediction and metagenomics before beginning his research in the field of cancer genomics. He has been a part of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) for over 10 years, as a data coordinator for the TCGA PanCancer project and leading the Multi-Center Mutation Calling in Multiple Cancers project (MC3), the principal mutation calling data set for the PanCanAtlas project. Most recently he is the PI of the OHSU center for the NCI’s Genomic Data Analysis Network. He has worked on a number of DREAM challenges that were part of the ICGC-TCGA DREAM Genomic Mutation Calling Challenge series including DNA (2013) Meta (2015), Heterogeneity (2016) and RNA (2016).

Dr. Heiser is Associate Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Co-Leader of the Knight Cancer Institute Quantitative Oncology Program at OHSU. Her laboratory is focused on understanding the phenotypic and molecular responses of cancer and normal cells to diverse stimuli including small molecule inhibitors and growth factors. The Heiser lab uses a variety of imaging-based and molecular techniques to assess dynamic changes in single cells, and have a particular focus toward understanding heterogeneous responses. Dr. Heiser has served as a DREAM co-Director since 2015.

Dr. Meyer is a research staff member and team leader at IBM research. He finds himself in the intersection between modeling, data analysis and wet lab. He is overall interested in how events at the molecular level and gene circuits determine mesoscopic or higher order phenomena from enzymatic reactions to circadian behaviors in flies, influences on apoptosis and prediction of olfactory responses from molecular structures. He has been actively involved in DREAM Challenges since 2010 and has led challenges addressing critical questions in systems biology such as parameter estimation in gene networks and across multiple biomedical fields.

Dr. Saez-Rodriguez is Professor of Medical Bioinformatics and Data Analysis at the Faculty of Medicine of Heidelberg University, Director of the Institute for Computational Biomedicine and group leader of the EMBL-Heidelberg University Molecular Medicine Partnership Unit. His research focuses on computational methods to understand and treat the deregulation of cellular networks in disease. Within DREAM, he has directed challenges mostly in the areas of network inference and pharmacogenomics.

Marina is currently an Associate Professor at the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute at UCSF. Prior to that she has worked as a Senior Research Scientist at Pfizer where she focused on developing Precision Medicine strategies in drug discovery. She completed her PhD in Biomedical Informatics at Stanford University. Dr. Sirota’s research experience in translational bioinformatics spans over 10 years during which she has co-authored over 100 scientific publications. Her research interests lie in developing computational integrative methods and applying these approaches in the context of disease diagnostics and therapeutics with a special focus on studying the role of the immune system in disease. The Sirota laboratory is funded by NIA, NLM, NIAMS, Pfizer, March of Dimes and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. As a young leader in the field, she has been awarded the AMIA Young Investigator Award in 2017. Dr. Sirota also is the director of the AI4ALL program at UCSF, with the goal of introducing high school girls to applications of AI and machine learning in biomedicine and serves as the director of outreach and advocacy at the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute.

Dr. Adi L. Tarca’s research over the past two decades was at the interface of computational biology, machine learning and maternal-fetal medicine. He is currently a tenured Professor in the Center for Molecular Medicine and Genetics of the Wayne State University School of Medicine, and he was the founding Head of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Unit of the Perinatology Research Branch (NICHD/NIH) until early 2023. With his PhD work focused on embedding prior knowledge in the training of neural networks, at Laval University, Quebec, he transitioned to bioinformatics and developed several methods and R/Bioconductor packages for omics data analysis such as preprocessing, pathway analysis, and predictive model development. His machine learning pipelines for genomics data were ranked at the top in multiple machine learning competitions including sbv IMPROVER Diagnostic Signature Challenge (2012), Species Translation Challenge (2013), Systems Toxicology Challenge (2016) and DREAM Single-cell Transcriptomics Challenge (2018). More recently, he has led the crowdsourcing initiative DREAM Preterm Birth Prediction Challenge: Transcriptomics (2019. He co-authored >200 articles and patents, work that has received 15,000 citations to date (h-index 60).

Dr. Costello is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. Dr. Costello’s lab has a balance of wet and dry research with a focus on cancer genomics and pharmacology, including the study of cancer development and progression in the wet lab and developing mechanistic computational models leveraging genomics data in the dry lab. Dr. Costello has been involved with the DREAM Challenges since 2009 and continues to develop and direct Challenges in cancer and other areas of research.

Dr. Guinney is the Senior Vice President of Cancer Genomics at Tempus, where he co-leads a diverse research program focused on precision oncology.

Prior to Tempus, Dr. Guinney was the Vice-President of Computational Oncology at Sage Bionetworks. During his 11-year tenure at Sage, Dr. Guinney grew and sustained a computational research lab focused on the development of predictive and mechanistic models of cancer. Areas of specialization include pathway modeling, immunophenotyping, cancer subtyping, and functional genomics in both solid and liquid tumors.