Marco Ramoni, PhD *

Dr. Ramoni received his Bachelors and PhD degrees from the University of Pavia in Italy. He undertook a postdoctoral fellowship in Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence in Medicine at McGill University, and was a research fellow at the United Kingdomís Knowledge Media Institute. He emigrated to the US where he was a Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of Massachusetts, then joined the faculty at Harvard Medical School where he was at the time of his posthumous election to the College an Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine. He also served as Director of the Biomedical Cybernetics Laboratory at Harvard, Associate Director of Bioinformatics at the Harvard-Partners Center for Genetics and Genomics, and Director of the biomedical informatics training fellowship at Childrens Hospital, Boston. Dr. Ramoni was a pioneer of the application of molecular bioinformatics methods to medicine, particularly in the areas of cancer biology and human genetics. He developed novel Bayesian approaches to learning and reasoning with high dimensionality molecular data, and advanced the science of gene expression analysis and gene expression temporal profiling in cancer. He developed methods for correlating clinical phenotypes with single nucleotide polymorphism data, and applied genome-wide association analysis to a variety of health problems including asthma, cholera, nicotine dependence and neoplasia. Dr. Ramoniís professional service included leadership in establishing the AMIA Summit on Translational Bioinformatics. He was a respected educator whose students have gone on to productive careers in biotechnology and academic medicine. Dr. Ramoniís untimely death in 2010 cut short a stellar career, and in recognition of his academic and professional service achievements, he was elected by his peers to fellowship in the College posthumously.