Luca Foschini, PhD
President of Sage
Dr. Luca Foschini is the President and CEO of Sage Bionetworks. Prior to this role, he co-founded and served as Chief Data Scientist at Evidation for 10 years. During his time at Evidation, Dr. Foschini led a team of over 50 health data scientists and shaped the role and requirements for the health data scientist profession. He also led Evidation's research and development efforts and worked on projects funded by organizations such as NIH, DARPA, and BARDA. Dr. Foschini collaborated with top biopharma companies to provide technology and methodology for collecting and analyzing person-generated health data (PGHD) from sources such as smartphones and wearables in order to measure human health.
Dr. Foschini's research in the past decade has focused on the emerging field of digital medicine, particularly in the areas of data collection and analysis methodology. He has published more than 70 peer-reviewed articles and given talks at the FDA, NIH, and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on topics including machine learning in healthcare, continuous health monitoring, and privacy in high-dimensional data.
Dr. Foschini holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a Master's degree in Computer Engineering from the Sant'Anna School of Pisa. He has also conducted theoretical computer science and cybersecurity research in academia and industry, including research positions at Google and Ask.com.
Dr. Foschini is a retired competitive programmer who represented Italy in the International Olympiads in Informatics and later coached the Italian national team.
Kim Baggett, MPA
Chief Operating Officer
Kim Baggett is the Chief Operating Officer at Sage Bionetworks and leads the operations and business functions and serves as a leadership partner and expert on operational strategy and operational issues. Prior to Sage, Kim spent the last 15 years at Seattle Children's Research Institute, where she was most recently Vice President, Center Business Operations and a key leader in setting and operationalizing the strategic direction for research and responsible for the business operations spanning basic, translational, clinical and health outcomes across multiple diseases. A Washington State native, Kim received a Master's Degree in Public Administration from Seattle University, a Bachelor's Degree from the University of Washington, and a graduate of Leadership Tomorrow.
Mike Kellen, PhD
Chief Technology Officer
Michael Kellen leads the technology platforms and services team at Sage Bionetworks. Since 2009, the team has supported open projects and challenges in the collaborative analysis of human health data through the development of the Synapse platform, and by providing support with data hosting, curation, and analysis. The team also supports the collection of human phenotypic data though the development of the Bridge platform. Michael has over 10 years experience developing software for academic and corporate users in the life sciences, and has brought several award-winning products to market in this space covering simulation, data capture and analysis workflow, data integration, and team collaboration. Prior to Sage, Michael held a variety of positions with Teranode corporation since joining as the company’s first employee in 2002, covering product development, field consulting, product management, and development management. Michael completed a doctorate in bioengineering at the University of Washington in 2002 with a focus in computational biology where he also helped develop scientific modeling and simulation technology subsequently licensed by Teranode.
Julie Bletz, PhD
Director, Scientific Coordination and Community Engagement
Julie Bletz is the Director of Science Coordination and Community Engagement at Sage Bionetworks and leads a team of data coordinators, curators, scientists, project managers and community managers to support resource sharing and drive collaboration in interdisciplinary scientific communities. She leads the coordinating center for the NCI-funded Cancer Systems Biology Consortium and Physical Sciences in Oncology Network, and co-leads the data management core for an NIH-funded coordinating center that is focused on aggregating all available data from across cohorts of Down Syndrome individuals. She is also a Director for DREAM challenges (dreamchallenges.org), a competition framework that engages diverse disciplines to solve complex biomedical problems.
Anna Greenwood, PhD
Director, Alzheimer's Disease Translational Research
Anna Greenwood is the Director of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Team at Sage Bionetworks, focused on advancing neuroscience research using team-based, open scientific approaches. Her current projects are aimed at building tools and processes to enable the Alzheimer’s disease research community to access and interpret open data and resources. She oversees dissemination of data and results through data portals for large collaborative research projects, including the development of the AD Knowledge Portal and the AD results sharing site Agora. Prior to Sage, Anna has experience as an academic researcher spanning several disciplines, including behavior, neuroscience, genetics, genomics, and evolutionary biology. She also spent several years in the tech industry, managing a scientific grant program at Amazon Web Services.
Brian O'Connor, PhD
Chief Data Officer
Dr. Brian O’Connor is the Chief Data Officer at Sage Bionetworks, where he leads the strategic development of Sage's data ingest, validation and transformation systems as head of the Data and Tooling team. This team is responsible for building scalable and portable technologies that facilitate data sharing, management, and analysis. Dr. O’Connor is also the co-chair of both the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) Cloud Work Stream and the NIH Cloud Platforms Interoperability (NCPI) effort's Systems Interoperability Working Group where he works on interoperability standards and best practices respectively. Before joining Sage, Dr. O'Connor was a Principal Investigator in the Data Sciences Platform (DSP) at the Broad Institute where he architected a wide variety of cloud compute and interoperability projects. Prior to his work at the Broad Institute, Dr O'Connor held Director-level positions at the Computational Genomics Platform group at the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute and the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR), where he spearheaded development and deployment of large-scale, cloud-based systems for analyzing genomic data. He is most proud of his leadership in the development of key interoperability standards that have increased the ability of researchers to ask meaningful questions across diverse datasets and systems.
Larsson Omberg, PhD
Vice President, Systems Biology
As the Vice President of Systems Biology, Larsson Omberg oversees a research agenda that focuses both on genomics and participant centered research where data is being collected using remote sensors and mobile phones. The group focuses heavily on using open and team based science to get a large number of external partners to collaborate on data intensive problems. Dr. Omberg has a background in computational biology and has been developing computational methods for genomics analysis and disease modeling. Dr Omberg obtained a MSc in Engineering Physics from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm Sweden and a PhD. from the University of Texas at Austin in Physics before performing a postdoctoral fellowship in Computational Biology and Biostatistics at Cornell University.
Christine Suver, PhD
Vice President, Research Governance & Ethics
Christine Suver leads the research governance and ethics group at Sage Bionetworks. Since 2009, the group has developed leading models of legal and ethical solutions, policies, governance processes, and tools to enable participant-centered research and open collaborations. One focus is addressing the many ethical and social issues that are emerging with comprehensive data linkage and novel genomic technologies. The group has also developed innovative electronic informed consent (eConsent) for a range of large research initiatives and is exploring the real-world implications of using eConsent to support the autonomous decision of populations with a wide range of cognitive ability. Prior to joining Sage Bionetworks, Dr. Suver held positions at Lifespan Bioscience and Merck & Co. Inc. She earned a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Washington.