Atul Butte


Atul J. Butte is researcher in biomedical informatics and biotechnology entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Since April 2015, Butte is heading the Institute for Computational Health Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco and serving as the executive director of clinical informatics for University of California's Health Sciences and Services. Previously, he was Chief of the Division of Systems Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital where he held the position of an Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Computer Science and Immunology & Rheumatology.
As a high school student, Butte was accepted into Brown University, where he studied computer science and was part of the Program in Liberal Medical Education, gaining him early acceptance into Brown's Alpert Medical School, from which he obtained his MD in 1995. He did a residency in pediatrics and a fellowship in pediatric endocrinology, both at Children's Hospital Boston. In 2004, he completed a Ph.D. from the Harvard–MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, supervised by Dr. Isaac Kohane.
Butte has an h-index of over 50, having authored over 125 scientific publications. He has also founded two biotechnology companies and wrote one of the first books on microarray analysis, Microarrays for an Integrative Genomics.
In April 2012, Butte delivered a TEDMED talk describing his lab's development of techniques using massive amount of publicly available biomedical research data to make new discoveries without running a wet-lab and actually outsourcing experiments using assaydepot.com.
Butte lives with his wife, Gini Deshpande, a cancer biology and biotechnology entrepreneur, and daughter in Menlo Park, CA. , Deshpande was the chief executive officer of NuMedii, an artificial intelligence technology company.