WASHINGTON, DC – The American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) will present the 2024 Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence to Atul Butte, MD, PhD, FACMI, on November 10 during the Opening Session of the AMIA 2024 Annual Symposium, November 9-13 in San Francisco.
In honor of Morris F. Collen, a thought leader in the field of medical informatics, the prestigious award is presented to an individual whose personal commitment and dedication to medical informatics has made a lasting impression on the field. The award is determined by ACMI’s Awards Committee.
"ACMI is honored to recognize Dr. Butte’s career, which has been defined by unwavering dedication, super-human execution, and a strong commitment to improving patient care through the work of biomedical informatics," said ACMI President Kevin B. Johnson, MD, MS, FACMI, FAMIA, FIAHSI, David L. Cohen University Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Computer and Information Science, Pediatrics, and Science Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. "Atul begins with the passionate belief that data improves our understanding of health and the delivery of health care. He works tirelessly to access data and share its relevance to patient and population concerns. An intentional big thinker, he has been a friend, mentor, and inspiration to thousands -- including me."
Dr. Butte is the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Distinguished Professor and inaugural Director of the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Butte is also the Chief Data Scientist for the University of California Health System, the eighth largest by revenue in the United States, with 21 health professional schools, six medical schools, six academic health centers, 13 hospitals, 10 million outpatient visits per year, and more than 1,000 care delivery sites.
A longtime leader in using all types of data to drive better decision making and science, Dr. Butte embraced his UC Health role using data across the six health systems in the state of California to create something profoundly impactful. During the pandemic, his data helped inform decisions not just at the University of California, but across the state and the country.
His work combining the data sets across the linked, yet independent, medical centers has been nothing short of visionary and transformative as UC drives operational improvements across all pharmacies, care sites, five National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer centers, and more. Dr. Butte’s philosophy is evidenced by his pinned Tweet: All the data in the world will not make a difference unless there are people ready to use it. He deeply understands the importance of translating findings and analysis and converting data into information, knowledge, and wisdom.
Dr. Butte is an inventor on over 20 patents, and has authored over 400 publications, with research repeatedly featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Wired Magazine.
Dr. Butte’s contributions to biomedical informatics are recognized internationally, and he is a popular speaker for both professional audiences as well as the public through his highly viewed TED Talks. Devoted to research and sharing his findings, he has been continually funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for more than 25 years.
His deep commitment to multidisciplinary teams has revolutionized the industry’s model for research, and he actively sought to better merge the fields of computational biologists and bio-informaticians resulting in a much more cohesive field of informatics.
Over the years, Dr. Butte has demonstrated solid leadership in pursuing academic and industry collaboration. He believes that while academia can discover new solutions and new sciences, commercialization is needed to bring those solutions to patients on a widespread basis. With a strong entrepreneurial spirit and a commitment to improve health care for patients, he has helped co-found three successful companies and serves as Scientific Advisor on several others.
Dr. Butte trained in Computer Science at Brown University, worked as a software engineer at Apple and Microsoft, received his MD at Brown University School of Medicine, trained in Pediatrics and Pediatric Endocrinology at Children's Hospital Boston, then received his PhD from Harvard Medical School and MIT.
Dr. Butte has been elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI), International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), and National Academy of Medicine. In 2013, he was recognized by the Obama Administration as a White House Champion of Change in Open Science for promoting science through publicly available data. Dr. Butte is also a co-founder of three investor-backed data-driven companies: Personalis (IPO, 2019), providing medical genome sequencing services; Carmenta (acquired by Progenity, 2015), discovering diagnostics for pregnancy complications; and NuMedii, discovering drugs through open molecular data and artificial intelligence.
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ACMI is an honorary College of elected Informatics Fellows from the United States and abroad who have made significant and sustained contributions to the field of medical informatics and who have met rigorous scholarly scrutiny by their peers. Incorporated in 1984, ACMI dissolved its separate corporate status to merge with the American Association for Medical Systems and Informatics (AAMSI) and the Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care (SCAMC), when AMIA was formed in 1989. The College now exists as an entity within AMIA, with its own bylaws and regulations.
AMIA’s Annual Symposium presents leading-edge scientific research on biomedical and health informatics, showcasing more than 600 scientific sessions. The Symposium is the largest informatics event worldwide. The work presented spans the spectrum of the informatics field: translational bioinformatics, clinical research informatics, clinical informatics, consumer health informatics and public health informatics.