People

Stephen Friend is the Chairman of the Board and Past-President of Sage Bionetworks, a non-profit organization that provides the tools and environment to conduct dynamic, large-scale collaborative biomedical research. He is an authority in the field of cancer biology and a pioneer in the field of the genetics of gene expression, integrating system biology approaches to complex diseases.

Stephen co-founded Sage Bionetworks in 2009 on the belief that successful biomedical research requires the active participation of all stakeholders. Through Sage Bionetworks, he has worked to reimagine the role of citizens in the research process and to build the tools to empower citizens to contribute both their data and expertise as they see fit. Under his leadership, Sage Bionetworks initiated it’s efforts to address pressing questions in biomedical research by strengthening interactions between scientists, participants, and advocates. His tireless advocacy for open science has helped to foster the collaborative research ecosystem that exists today.

Stephen is currently designing a virtual institute to explore fundamental issues around how to make individual symptom predictions and how to return agency to individuals so they might navigate their own paths between health and disease. He was most recently at Apple Inc. where he worked on ways to impact people’s lives in health and disease. Prior to co-founding and leading Sage as President, he was Senior Vice President and Franchise Head for Oncology Research at Merck & Co., Inc. where he led Merck’s Basic Cancer Research efforts. He founded and co-led the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center’s “Seattle Project” , an advanced institute for drug discovery, and later co-founded Rosetta Inpharmatics. Stephen also held faculty positions at Harvard Medical School from 1987 to 1995 and at Massachusetts General Hospital from 1990 to 1995.

He received his M.D/Ph.D. from Indiana University. He was named an Ashoka Fellow for his work at Sage Bionetworks.

Dr. Schadt is the Dean for Precision Medicine and Mount Sinai Professor in Predictive Health and Computational Biology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He was previously Founding Director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology, and Professor and Chair of the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences. Dr. Schadt is also founder and CEO of Sema4, a patient-centered predictive health company.

He is an industry leader in network biology with numerous high-profile publications over the past five years and is the Editor-in-Chief of the new journal Open Network Biology. Dr. Schadt was a founding member of Sage Bionetworks, Chief Scientific Officer at Pacific Biosciences, and Executive Director of Genetics and Chief Scientist at Rosetta Inpharmatics/Merck Research, where he founded its Research Genetics Department after Rosetta was acquired by Merck in 2001. His extensive applications in systems biology have helped define the genetics of gene expression as a new field in statistical genetics. Prior to joining Rosetta, Dr. Schadt was a Senior Research Scientist at Roche Bioscience.

He received his BS in applied mathematics/computer science from California Polytechnic State University, and his MA in pure mathematics and his PhD in bio-mathematics from UCLA.

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, Luca 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. Luca 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.

Luca'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.

Luca 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.

Luca is a retired competitive programmer who represented Italy in the International Olympiads in Informatics and later coached the Italian national team.

Kim Baggett is the Chief Operating Officer at Sage Bionetworks. She 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.

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, Christine held positions at Lifespan Bioscience and Merck & Co. Inc. She earned a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Washington.

Susheel Varma is the Chief Data Officer, where he leads strategy across all scientific research and biomedical data management teams.

Prior to joining Sage Bionetworks, Susheel was the Head of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science at the Information Commissioner’s Office, where he was at the forefront of developing and implementing cutting-edge technology and AI regulations, skillfully balancing technological advancements with critical considerations in data privacy and ethical AI use.

Previously, he was the Chief Technology Officer at Health Data Research UK, where he led the digital, data, and technology strategy, playing a pivotal role in transforming health data research across the UK. He spearheaded initiatives like the Health Data Research Innovation Gateway, Trusted Research Environments (TREs) and the National Cohort Discovery Service, significantly advancing the interoperability and secure data sharing across the health and research sectors. In his previous roles at EMBL-EBI and ELIXIR, he led an international portfolio of data science projects in multiple jurisdictions and research infrastructures - EMBL, ELIXIR, EOSC and GA4GH.

He holds an Executive MBA specializing in the Management of Research Infrastructures, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Computational Systems Biology from the University of Sheffield. He is also an elected Fellow of the British Computer Society for his career contributions developing innovative solutions at the intersection of academia, healthcare and technology.

Mackenzie Wildman is the Chief of Staff at Sage Bionetworks. She leads cross-team initiatives and works with the President and the rest of the Leadership Team to increase efficiency and coordination across the organization. Prior to Sage, Mackenzie held various roles spanning product management, project management, technical leadership, and customer success leadership within fast-moving startup environments Evidation, a health data company, and later Holaplex, a web3 open source software company. Mackenzie holds a PhD in Mathematics from Lehigh University and carried out postdoctoral work at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Stephen Friend is the Chairman of the Board and Past-President of Sage Bionetworks, a non-profit organization that provides the tools and environment to conduct dynamic, large-scale collaborative biomedical research. He is an authority in the field of cancer biology and a pioneer in the field of the genetics of gene expression, integrating system biology approaches to complex diseases.

Stephen co-founded Sage Bionetworks in 2009 on the belief that successful biomedical research requires the active participation of all stakeholders. Through Sage Bionetworks, he has worked to reimagine the role of citizens in the research process and to build the tools to empower citizens to contribute both their data and expertise as they see fit. Under his leadership, Sage Bionetworks initiated it’s efforts to address pressing questions in biomedical research by strengthening interactions between scientists, participants, and advocates. His tireless advocacy for open science has helped to foster the collaborative research ecosystem that exists today.

Stephen is currently designing a virtual institute to explore fundamental issues around how to make individual symptom predictions and how to return agency to individuals so they might navigate their own paths between health and disease. He was most recently at Apple Inc. where he worked on ways to impact people’s lives in health and disease. Prior to co-founding and leading Sage as President, he was Senior Vice President and Franchise Head for Oncology Research at Merck & Co., Inc. where he led Merck’s Basic Cancer Research efforts. He founded and co-led the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center’s “Seattle Project” , an advanced institute for drug discovery, and later co-founded Rosetta Inpharmatics. Stephen also held faculty positions at Harvard Medical School from 1987 to 1995 and at Massachusetts General Hospital from 1990 to 1995.

He received his M.D/Ph.D. from Indiana University. He was named an Ashoka Fellow for his work at Sage Bionetworks.

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, Luca 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. Luca 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.

Luca'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.

Luca 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.

Luca is a retired competitive programmer who represented Italy in the International Olympiads in Informatics and later coached the Italian national team.

Dr. Schadt is the Dean for Precision Medicine and Mount Sinai Professor in Predictive Health and Computational Biology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He was previously Founding Director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology, and Professor and Chair of the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences. Dr. Schadt is also founder and CEO of Sema4, a patient-centered predictive health company.

He is an industry leader in network biology with numerous high-profile publications over the past five years and is the Editor-in-Chief of the new journal Open Network Biology. Dr. Schadt was a founding member of Sage Bionetworks, Chief Scientific Officer at Pacific Biosciences, and Executive Director of Genetics and Chief Scientist at Rosetta Inpharmatics/Merck Research, where he founded its Research Genetics Department after Rosetta was acquired by Merck in 2001. His extensive applications in systems biology have helped define the genetics of gene expression as a new field in statistical genetics. Prior to joining Rosetta, Dr. Schadt was a Senior Research Scientist at Roche Bioscience.

He received his BS in applied mathematics/computer science from California Polytechnic State University, and his MA in pure mathematics and his PhD in bio-mathematics from UCLA.

Tony Ford-Hutchinson has more than 30 years of experience in pharmaceuticals, drug and vaccines discovery, research and development, business development, emerging markets and scientific strategy from his time working with Merck in increasing roles of global responsibility in R&D.

Prior to being recruited to Merck, he worked at King's College Hospital Medical School, in London, for nearly 10 years in the field of inflammation and arachidonic acid metabolism where he made some fundamental discoveries on leukotrienes, work that was put into practice at Merck Frosst, Canada, which eventually leading to Singulair® (leukotriene D4 receptor antagonist) and the Cox-2 inhibitors (Vioxx® and Arcoxia®).

Subsequent career highlights at Merck relating to infectious disease include the development of HIV integrase inhibitor Isentress® and development & licensing of therapies to tackle drug-resistant bacterial infections. Tony's most recent responsibility at Merck as head of Vaccine R&D led to commercialization of 4 vaccines; Gardasil®, Zostavax®, Proquad® and Rotateq®. After retiring from Merck Tony has been either an Independent Board Member, Scientific Advisory Board member or Chief Scientific Officer for a number of biotechs and non-profit organizations.

Carole Goble is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, UK and the Head of Node of ELIXIR-UK, the national node of the ELIXIR, the European Research Infrastructure for Life Science data. ELIXIR is a pan-European inter-governmental organization that coordinates, integrates and sustains bioinformatics resources across its 23 member countries. ELIXIR-UK coordinates the 24 UK participating organizations.

She has spent 25 years innovating in open research and digital infrastructure in the biosciences and related disciplines, with an emphasis on computational workflows, open and reproducible science, open sharing, knowledge and metadata management, and FAIR digital objects. With over 350 publications, she has led innovations and products in all these fields, including the development and use of ontologies in bioscience and the development of one of the first popular open workflow platforms and a pioneering workflow sharing platform. At Manchester she leads a team of Researchers, Research Software Engineers and Data Stewards who, with an extensive range of partners and projects, develop and operate open and FAIR infrastructure services for the global community and at the national and European level for the European Open Science Cloud. She is also the director of digital infrastructure for the European Research Infrastructure for Industrial biotechnology and previously worked with the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations on projects on FAIR data and open pharmacological knowledge graphs.

Nationally, Carole is a co-founder of the UK’s Software Sustainability Institute and serves on the leadership team of Health Data Research-UK, the national institute for health data science. As an advocate of open science she has served on many international and national committees, and is currently UK expert representative on the G7 Open Science Working Group. She is a co-author of the FAIR Guiding Principles for Scientific Data and Director of FAIR Computational Workflows for the Workflow Community Initiative.

Carole received her BSc from Manchester, and an honorary doctorate from Maastricht. She is a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by HM the Queen in 2014 for her services to Science. In 2008 she received the Microsoft Jim Gray eScience award, the only woman to be so honored.

Gustavo Stolovitzky is a world-renowned expert in computational biology, disease modeling and nano-biotechnology, with over 25 years of experience in high throughput data analysis for biology and the application of technology to solve biomedical problems.

As Chief Science Officer at GeneDx, Gustavo has a key role in developing the strategic research direction of the company and is responsible for advancing our platform of algorithms to help researchers, health system partners, providers and patients translate the information contained in health data into actionable knowledge. Gustavo held this same role at Sema4 prior to the company being renamed as GeneDx in January 2023.

Gustavo spent 23 years at IBM Research, where he was appointed IBM Fellow, the highest technical honor bestowed by IBM. At IBM Research he was the Founding Chair of the Exploratory Life Sciences Program and, previously he was the Director of the Translational Systems Biology and Nanobiotechnology Program. He has authored more than 180 articles, reviews, and book chapters, and holds over 80 granted patents.

He is well known as the founder of the DREAM Challenges, where he nucleated a community of more than 25,000 researchers applying AI to biomedicine and championed the values of open science and data sharing, as well as rigorous evaluation of performance and reproducibility of algorithms. Through the DREAM Challenges and his own research, Gustavo addressed core challenges in biomedical research, with great influence in the areas of biological network inference, cancer genomics, and prediction of treatment response and disease outcome.

Jennifer C. Goldsack founded and serves as the CEO of the Digital Medicine Society (DiMe), a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to advancing digital medicine to optimize human health. Jennifer’s work focuses on applied approaches to the safe, effective, and equitable use of digital technologies to improve health, healthcare, and health research. She sits on the boards of the Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) and Sage Bionetworks, is a member of the Roundtable on Genomics and Precision Health at the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine and serves on the World Economic Forum Digital Health Action Collaborative.

Previously, Jennifer spent several years at the Clinical Trials Transformation Initiative (CTTI), a public-private partnership co-founded by Duke University and the FDA. There, she led the development and implementation of several projects within CTTI’s Digital Program and was the operational co-lead on the first randomized clinical trial using FDA’s Sentinel System.

Jennifer spent five years working in research at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, first in Outcomes Research in the Department of Surgery and later in the Department of Medicine. More recently, she helped launch the Value Institute, a pragmatic research and innovation center embedded in a large academic medical center in Delaware.

Jennifer earned her master’s degree in chemistry from the University of Oxford, England, her masters in the history and sociology of medicine from the University of Pennsylvania, and her MBA from the George Washington University. Jennifer is a retired athlete, formerly a Pan American Games Champion, Olympian, and World Championship silver medalist.

Brian J. Fox is a technologist and free software advocate. As the first employee of the Free Software Foundation, he helped build the GNU project through software additions such as authoring the Bash shell, Readine/History libraries, and the TeXInfo documentation system, maintaining GNU Emacs, GDB, and other software, contributions to free software licenses, including discussions and input to the original GPL, and the creation of the LGPL, and numerous technical architectural decisions.

Fox has contributed software, critical thinking and technical architecture to several Ph.D. theses, was a principal architect and built the first web-based banking system in the US (WFB), worked on campus at several universities, including MIT, Caltech, and UCSB, and created and demonstrated a complete open source election system running on an open hardware specification.

At his venture technology firm, Fox invested software, technical architecture, and business and go-to-market strategies into numerous startup companies. Fox holds 14 patents spanning software architecture, mechanical engineering, and business systems.

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.