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. 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.

Dr. Stolovitzky is Program Director of the Translational Systems Biology and Nanobiotechnology Program at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center, an Adjunct Professor of Genetics and Genomics Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and an Adjunct Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University. His research focuses on 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. 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. 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. 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.

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.