Brian D. Athey, Ph.D.

NCIBI Principal Investigator/Senior Scientific Director
NCIBI Core 6, 7 Director - Core 5 Co-Director - Core 1 Investigator

Michael Savageau Collegiate Professor
Chair, Professor of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics
Professor of Psychiatry
Professor of Internal Medicine, U-M Medical School
Co-Chief Executive Officer, tranSMART Foundation
PI, National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics (NCIBI)

Phone: 734-615-9292
E-Mail: bleu@umich.edu
Website: www-personal.umich.edu/~bleu/

Brian D. Athey, Ph.D., is a Professor of Biomedical Informatics and has recently been named “Chair Designate” of a new Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics at the University of Michigan Medical School, and also serves as overall Director of Academic Informatics and Information Technology of the School. He is also the Principal Investigator of the NIH/NIGMS Bioinformatics Training Grant. Trained as a biophysicist, Athey is now recognized as one of the nation’s experts in the new field of ‘Translational Bioinformatics’ and also research cyberinfrastructure.

In the Mid-1980s, Brian proposed the double helical crossed-linker model for the structure of chromatin, once quite controversial, it is now generally accepted. Brian established the first nationwide Internet2 Visible Human Project demonstration under contract with the National Library of Medicine (NLM), was Principal Investigator of the DARPA Virtual Soldier Project, and he currently leads the NIH National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics (NCIBI.org), one of seven NIH Roadmap Centers for Biomedical Computing. Brian is also Associate Director of Informatics and IT in the Michigan Institute for Clinical and Health Research, home fo the UM CTSA, and has served as national co-chair of the Clinical and Translational Sciences Award (CTSA) Informatics Key Function Committee (IKFC).

He also currently serves as a special advisor to the Chief Information Officer and Director of the Center for Information Technology (CIT) of the NIH. In 2000, Brian was named a Peace Fellow of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS.org) for his work in the 1990s to combat biological warfare and terrorism. He is a founder and board member of the Washington, DC, based Scientists and Engineers for America (SEA.org).