Meet the team behind the research.

Brian Dillard

VP of Innovation & Technology
VIA Metropolitan Transit

Brian Dillard is currently the Vice President of Technology & Innovation at VIA Metropolitan Transit. He previously served as the Chief Innovation Officer for the City of San Antonio. Prior to joining the local public sector, Brian was a Cybersecurity consultant in the private sector working with Shell Oil, Chevron Oil, Lockheed Martin, and Delta Risk. Brian began his career as a member of the United States Air Force where he served ten-years Active Duty as a Cybersecurity Operations Specialist.

Brian is a third-generation Eastside San Antonio native. Upon returning to San Antonio toward the end of his military career, Brian became a neighborhood advocate and community leader. Brian is currently serving as Board Chair for Essence Preparatory Public School, Vice Chair for SA Digital Connects, Board Secretary for Corazon Ministries Inc., and Board Member for the SAISD Foundation. Brian is the former President of the Dignowity Hill Neighborhood Association and has served as a Board Member for VIA Metropolitan Transit Authority, the Ella Austin Community Center, the San Antonio Centro Partnership, and the Martinez Street Women’s Center. Brian is an alumnus of Leadership San Antonio (LSA43), Leadership SAISD, the San Antonio New Leaders Council, the HBS Young American Leaders Program, and he is also a 2020 San Antonio Business Journal 40 Under 40 honoree.

Gustavo Stolovitzky, PhD

IBM Fellow; Program Director, Translational Systems Biology and Nanobiotechnology
IBM Research

Gustavo Stolovitzky is Program Director of the Translational Systems Biology and Nanobiotechnology Program at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center, an Adjunct Professor of Genetics and Genomics Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and an Adjunct Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University.  His research focuses on the analysis of high-throughput biological data, the mathematical modeling of biological processes, and the use of nanotechnology for biomedical applications in diagnostics.

Dr. Stolovitzky co-founded and leads the Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessments and Methods (DREAM). Started in 2006 with Andrea Califano and supported through a partnership with Sage Bionetworks, DREAM is an international, collaborative effort that organizes challenges to identify the most effective methods in systems biology and leverage the expertise of the scientific community to address key problems in translational medicine.

Hava Siegelmann, PhD

Provost Professor, University of Massachusetts
Former Program Manager, DARPA

Dr. Siegelmann, a recognized expert in Complex Systems and Neural Networks, focuses on theoretical computational neuroscience, computation in and modeling of natural systems and their application to intelligent systems. Of particular research interest are intelligence vis-a-vis adaptive memory, advanced models of cognition, and evolving, intelligent interfaces for robotics and other intelligent systems. Her studies often involve multi-scale modeling and system level analysis of major disorders such as cancer. The creator of a new field of computer science, Super-Turing computation, Dr. Siegelmann is applying the theory to biological systems and exploring them in connection with a new generation of analog computer.

Kim Branson, PhD

Senior VP & Global Head of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, GSK

Dr. Kim Branson joined GSK April 2019 as Senior VP and Global Head of AI/ML. Kim Branson has been involved in large scale machine learning and medical informatics initiatives for over 15 years, over a range of ventures from computational drug design to disease risk prediction. Prior to joining GSK, Kim was Head of Artificial Intelligence for the Informatics department of Early Clinical Development at Genentech. He also served as Founding Chief Data Scientist at Lumiata, a predictive health analytics company. Kim received degrees from the University of Adelaide, and a PhD from the University of Melbourne. He was a Peter Doherty fellow and received postdoctoral training at Stanford University. He held leadership and consulting roles in the pharmaceutical and medical informatics industry, notably at Vertex Pharmaceuticals. Following this, Kim worked extensively in online search as a founding member of Discovery Engine (acquired by Twitter in 2009) and in Health Informatics as the Founding Chief Scientist of Gliimpse (acquired by Apple in 2017)

Matthew Mattina

VP of AI Systems Architecture
Microsoft

Matthew Mattina is the Distinguished Engineer and Senior Director of Machine Learning Research at Arm, where he leads a global team of machine learning researchers developing advanced hardware, software, and algorithms. Prior to joining Arm in 2015, Matt was Chief Technology Officer at Tilera, where he was responsible for overall company technology, processor architecture, and strategy. Prior to Tilera, Matt was a CPU architect at Intel and invented and designed the Intel Ring Uncore Architecture. Matt has been granted over 30 patents relating to CPU design, multicore processors, on-chip interconnects, and cache coherence protocols. Matt holds a BS in Computer and Systems Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an MS in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University.

Michael Snyder, PhD

Director, Center for Genomics & Personalized Medicine; Professor, Stanford University

Michael Snyder is the Stanford Ascherman Professor and Chair of Genetics and the Director of the Center of Genomics and Personalized Medicine. Dr. Snyder received his Ph.D. training at the California Institute of Technology and carried out postdoctoral training at Stanford University. He is a leader in the field of functional genomics and proteomics, and one of the major participants of the ENCODE project. His laboratory study was the first to perform a large-scale functional genomics project in any organism, and has developed many technologies in genomics and proteomics. These including the development of proteome chips, high-resolution tiling arrays for the entire human genome, methods for global mapping of transcription factor binding sites (ChIP-chip now replaced by ChIP-seq), paired end sequencing for mapping of structural variation in eukaryotes, de novo genome sequencing of genomes using high throughput technologies and RNA-Seq. These technologies have been used for characterizing genomes, proteomes and regulatory networks.

Seminal findings from the Snyder laboratory include the discovery that much more of the human genome is transcribed and contains regulatory information than was previously appreciated, and a high diversity of transcription factor binding occurs both between and within species. He has also combined different state–of–the–art “omics” technologies to perform the first longitudinal detailed integrative personal omics profile (iPOP) of person and used this to assess disease risk and monitor disease states for personalized medicine. He is a co-founder of several biotechnology companies, including Protometrix (now part of Life Technologies), Affomix (now part of Illumina), Excelix, and Personalis, and he presently serves on the board of a number of companies.