Precision medicine promises to deliver ultra-personalized care by casting medicine as an optimization problem: identifying the best possible treatment with respect to all available data.

A slew of recent advances in biology, starting with the ability to sequence the human genome, have caused an explosion in the amount of data one can collect on a single patient and a similar explosion in the complexity of reasoning about this data in order to solve this optimization problem. Computational support for the practicing physician is no longer an option.

This talk covers precision medicine from the ground up for computer scientists — through a personal journey from programming languages research into academic medicine. It will demonstrate progress to date, including the now-routine use of relational programming in miniKanren to identify personalized treatments for patients with some of the rarest and most challenging diseases in the world.

The audience will leave with a sense of enthusiasm for the opportunities they could choose to pursue in shaping the future of precision medicine.

Professor of Internal Medicine and Computer Science, UAB

Hugh Kaul Endowed Chair in Personalized Medicine

Director, Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute

Senior Lecturer, Harvard Medical School