UC San Diego hiring 'big data' stars | UTSanDiego.com:
San Diego is quickly becoming the focal point of a nationwide effort to use high-speed computers and smart software to sift through mountains of biomedical data for clues about why people develop everything from cancer to Alzheimer’s disease.
In the past nine months, UC San Diego and the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla recruited three of the country’s top “big data” researchers from Google, MIT and the University of Colorado. Two of the deals will cost the campus about $9 million.
“Computers are the new microscopes, and data is the new blood draw,” said Rajesh Gupta, chair of the department of computer science and engineering at UC San Diego.
The latest recruit is Jill Mesirov, the 64 year-old chief informatics officer at the elite Broad Institute at MIT-Harvard. She's joining the UC San Diego School of Medicine, where she’ll build the infrastructure needed to analyze such things as genomes, electronic medical records and collections of medical images.This is an emerging field also known as bioinformatics. The field is undergoing explosive growth, largely due to the plummeting cost of sequencing people’s data-rich genomes, and the growing interest in the trillions of micro-organisms that live on people’s skin, and in their mouth and gut. The microbiome, as it is called, helps people do such things as digest food and fight bacteria. Scientists also are generating extraordinary amounts of data about the brain, especially in San Diego, which is deeply involved in a federal effort to develop tools to observe large numbers of neurons interacting in real-time.
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