Adam Margolin has been recruited by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai to lead a new initiative to accelerate the pace of therapeutic discovery through integration of large-scale data analysis and advanced genomic technologies.
Margolin was named professor and chair of the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and senior associate dean of precision medicine. He will also lead Mount Sinai’s Icahn Institute, which has been renamed the Icahn Institute for Data Science and Genomic Technology. He will lead the new enterprise-wide program that focuses on harnessing huge molecular datasets to predict new therapies for complex diseases by using advanced biotechnologies to rapidly tailor novel therapies to each patient.
Margolin is an expert in developing machine-learning algorithms to analyze large-scale datasets, to predict therapies specific to an individual patient, and to infer the key cellular processes that underlie cancer drug susceptibility and other clinically relevant phenotypes. He has developed software systems to enable collaborative analysis for several of the largest national and international projects in cancer, genomics, cancer immunotherapy, stem cell research, and pediatric diseases.
Margolin will inherit the positions previously held by Eric Schadt, who was recruited in 2011 to lead Mount Sinai’s programs in data science and genomics. Through these efforts, Mount Sinai: grew the genetics department to rise within the top 5 nationally in NIH funding for research; built the largest supercomputing facility of any academic medical center in the United States; was named by Fast Company among the top 10 most innovative organizations in the world in Data Science; developed a state-of-the-art genomic technology development program; and spun out the molecular testing company, SEMA4.
Margolin joins Mount Sinai from Oregon Health & Science University, where he was the director of computational biology and professor of biomedical engineering.
