Artificial Intelligence in Oncology: Committee
Organizing Committee
Yves Lussier, MD, FAMIA, FACMI, Chair
Yves A. Lussier, MD, FAMCI, is the Chair of Biomedical Informatics at University of Utah School of Medicine. As a professional engineer and physician-scientist, he is an international expert in translational bioinformatics and a pioneer in research informatics techniques including systems biology, AI, ML, ontologies, and high-throughput methods in personalized medicine. Previously, he was the Associate Vice President for Information Science and Chief Knowledge Officer of the UArizona Health Sciences (UAHS), Founding Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Biostatistics, and Professor of Medicine. During his time at UArizona, he developed novel programs in biomedical informatics, computational genomics, and precision health, as well as provided critical leadership to advance precision health approaches to health outcomes and healthcare delivery and in the development of big data analytical tools and resource services. Prior to his tenure at UArizona, Dr. Lussier was professor of medicine, bioengineering and biopharmaceutical sciences at University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and assistant vice president for health affairs and chief research information officer for the University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences System (2011-13).
From 2006-2011, he was the associate director of informatics for the University of Chicago Comprehensive Cancer Center as well as co-director of biomedical informatics for the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA)-funded Institute for Translational Medicine. From 2001-2006, Dr. Lussier was an assistant professor in the Departments of Biomedical Informatics and Medicine at Columbia University in New York. Dr. Lussier’s research interests focus on the use of ontologies, knowledge technologies and genomic network model to accurately individualize the treatment of disease and to repurpose therapies. He has National Institutes of Health funding for a clinical trial that repositioned a combination therapy, he also bioinformatically predicted and obtained biological confirmation of several novel tumor suppressor microRNAs, including the first one underpinning the oligo- vs poly- metastasis development of cancer. His research has been featured in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. He has authored over 200 publications and delivered more than 100 invited presentations in precision medicine, systems medicine and translational bioinformatics, including 14 opening conference keynotes. A Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, Dr. Lussier is a member of numerous governance, technology transfer, scientific and editorial boards, including the American Medical Informatics Association, International Society for Computational Biology, Society for Clinical and Translational Science, American Society for Cancer Research, Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists, American Association for the Advancement of Science and American Society for Human Genetics.
Dr. Lussier received a bachelor of engineering and his medical degree from the University of Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada. He performed predoctoral research in the Departments of Medicine and Human Physiology at the University of Sherbrooke. After medical school, Dr. Lussier completed an internship in ophthalmology at Laval University Hospital in Quebec City, and a residency in family medicine at the University of Sherbrooke Medical Center. He was a post-doctoral residential fellow in the Department of Biomedical Informatics in the College of Surgeons & Physicians at Columbia University. Dr. Lussier is Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board, WIN Consortium.USA academic leaders invited by the White House for its Precision Medicine Summit.
Ece Uzun, MS, PhD, FAMIA, Chair
Dr. Ece Uzun received B.S in Chemical Engineering at Istanbul Technical University and M.S. in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering at Sabanci University in Istanbul, Turkey. She completed her PhD in Chemical Engineering at Northeastern University, Boston, MA. During her PhD, she studied mathematical modeling of drug delivery systems. During her postdoctoral studies at Brown University, she worked on bioinformatics focusing on neurodevelopmental disorders and autism. In April 2016, Dr. Uzun joined the department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Brown University and founded clinical bioinformatics at Brown University Health. She is the founding Deputy Director of Brown Center for Clinical Cancer Informatics and Data Science (CCIDS). Currently she is Associate Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. She is also a member of Brown University Center for Computational Molecular Biology and Institute for Biology, Engineering and Medicine.
In addition to her clinical work, Dr. Uzun has a research group focusing on machine learning based predictive models in cancer and neurodevelopmental disorders using clinical genomic data, protein-protein interaction networks in cancer for drug discovery and development of novel genomic variation detection algorithms. She is the Editor-in-Chief in JMIR Bioinformatics and Biotechnology journal. She is in the editorial boards of Nucleic Acid Research (NAR) Cancer and PLOS One. Dr. Uzun is an active member of American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). She is the Chair of the AMIA Genomics and Translational Bioinformatics Working Group and co-Chair of the Women in AMIA (WIA) Career Development Subcommittee. She is also the past chair of the WIA Awards and Leadership Subcommittee. She is the Vice Chair of Translational Bioinformatics and Precision Medicine track for the AMIA Informatics Summit 2025 Scientific Program Committee. She was also co-Chair of International Conference on Intelligent Biology and Medicine (ICIBM 2024) Program Committee.