Russ Altman, MD, PhD

Dr. Altman received his bachelors degree summa cum laude in biochemistry and molecular biology from Harvard, and his M.D. and a Ph.D. in Medical Information Sciences from Stanford. At the time of his election to the College, Dr. Altman was an assistant professor of medicine and computer science at Stanford, where he is a member of the medical informatics group, maintained a general internal medicine practice, and co-directed the Medical Scientist Training Program. Dr. Altmanís research interests are in the area of computational biology and bioinformatics. His doctoral dissertation focused on probabalistic methods for combining sparse and uncertain data sources to compute three dimensional molecular structures. For the promise shown by this work, he received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in a ceremony at the White House. Dr. Altman has studied how scientists can share, communicate and collaboratively refine their collective understanding of a scientific problem. His recent work featured the RiboWeb project, which is an Internet-based resource for structuring and sharing molecular data and literature related to bacterial ribosomes. Dr. Altman is a member of the Board of Directors of the International Society for Computational Biology, a member of the executive committee of the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure. His election to the College recognizes these academic and professional service achievements.