Spearheaded by the Center for Computational Biomedicine (CCB) at HMS, the Tananbaum Healthcare Transformation Initiative is catalyzing data-driven insights and collaborative innovation, bringing together a community of brilliant scientists, clinicians, and students across Harvard University in the fields of health care policy, regulatory science, business, and entrepreneurship to improve healthcare and its delivery.
Robert Gentleman
Executive Director, CCB, HMS
An accomplished statistician and bioinformatician, Dr. Gentleman is one of the creators of the R programming language and a founder of the Bioconductor project, an open-source collaborative software tool to promote statistical analysis of biological data. He has served as Vice President of 23andMe, where he helped launch their therapeutic division, and as Senior Director for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at Genentech. He was Head of Computational Biology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and held academic positions at Harvard University, the University of Auckland, and the University of Waterloo. Dr. Gentleman’s research interests are genomics, machine learning, data visualization, and applying statistical and computational methods to study human disease. Dr. Robert Gentleman is also the Founding Executive Director of Harvard Medical School’s Center for Computational Biomedicine.
Jaclyn Mallard
Director of Administration and Education, CCB HMS
Dr. Jaclyn Mallard earned her Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Michigan State University and a PhD in Biology specializing in Immunology from Boston College. Before her graduate studies, she gained teaching and tutoring experience across different educational levels. As a Research Technician at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Mallard’s work focused on the immune response to transplantation. During her graduate and post-graduate training at Boston College, she studied the immune response to HIV infection in the brain. Dr. Mallard also developed an interest in strategic management, participating in volunteer consulting teams at Tufts Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she contributed to developing go-to-market and growth strategies for local startup companies. Additionally, she gained professional consulting experience, working on projects such as patient journey mapping, pricing analysis, competitive market analysis, and strategic design of clinical trials for pharmaceutical companies. From 2019 to 2021, Dr. Mallard served as the Program Manager for The Chief Academic Officer at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, overseeing the development and implementation of the hospital’s strategic plan for research, education, and innovation.
Dr. Mallard holds a key role in CCB, overseeing strategic planning, operational activities, and administrative management of the Center’s staff: Over the past two years, she has implemented infrastructure and processes for project collaborations, developed the CCR website with interactive features, and launched. the inaugural education program. Dr. Mallard has actively collaborated with directors of other computational education programs to coordinate training efforts, avoid duplication, and guide HMS constituents in choosing the appropriate program for their computational needs. Additionally, she serves as the administrative lead for the Inovalon Data Consortium, spearheading the development of a cost recovery model and principles to bring together researchers from various Harvard schools. Leading a team of four, including a Program Manager, two Project Managers, and a Curriculum Fellow, Dr. Mallard is enthusiastic about merging science and business and is committed to ensuring CCB’s success in achieving the goals of the Tananbaum Healthcare Transformation Initiative.
Nathan Palmer
Director of Data and Analytics Platforms, CCB HMS
Dr. Nathan Palmer received a PhD in computer science from MIT, studying machine learning, protein folding, and functional genomics. He held a postdoctoral research position in the lab of Dr. Isaac Kohane at HMS, during which his research interests expanded to include large-scale genomics, epidemiology, and medical informatics. He then directed the Healthcare Data Science Program in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at HMS.
In his current role as Director of Data and Analytics Platforms, Dr. Palmer is part of a team of leading-edge technologists who evaluate and deploy modern data analytic processing and storage platforms to meet the needs of emergent research programs supported by the CCB that improve research reproducibility, scale, and efficiency. This team provides access to data resources comprising tens of billions of medical facts from tens of millions of patients to the research community at HMS and develops the technical and methodological solutions to perform novel analytics at scale. Dr. Palmer continues to work in functional genomics and epidemiology through collaborations with various Harvard teaching hospitals.
Synclaire Oglesby
Program Manager, CCB HMS
Following the successful completion of the thesis component of her master’s degree in biomedical sciences at Tuft’s School of Medicine, Synclaire Oglesby ventured into a fulfilling career as a Research Operations Manager. Her role encompassed overseeing operations in a dynamic, multidisciplinary laboratory that spanned multiple institutions and featured three adaptable spaces. This position required her to apply her advanced scientific knowledge and expertise to tackle intricate challenges inherent in the program.Through this experience, she deepened her passion for strategic design while gaining invaluable insights into the world of cross-institutional and interdisciplinary research.
Taking a broader perspective, Oglesby’s ultimate career objective has always been centered around enhancing healthcare accessibility. Recognizing the potential of digital products to drive healthcare towards a more precise and accessible future, she is actively engaged in assisting health tech innovators from the initial idea phase to successful implementation, with far-reaching implications. As the Program Manager for the Tananbaum Healthcare Transformation Initiative, she has the opportunity to combine her passions for strategic design and healthcare access, supporting the forthcoming revolution in healthcare. She utilizes her extensive knowledge in operations, communications, and leadership to actively contribute to the design and execution of the goals set forth by the Tananbaum Healthcare Transformation Initiative.
Under the exceptional guidance of Dr. Gentleman, Dr. Mallard, and Dr. Palmer, Oglesby is responsible for developing an effective implementation strategy for the Tananbaum Healthcare Transformation Initiative, which involves conducting stakeholder interviews with health tech innovators and investors to gain insights into the existing innovation landscape and identify the specific needs of the innovators. Concurrently, Oglesby and the CCB team are establishing a collaborative network and raising awareness about the Tananbaum Healthcare Transformation Initiative. As part of these ongoing efforts, the CCB team plans to host a Health Tech Innovation Seminar Series in Fall 2024. The aim of this series is to generate interest and engagement among various institutions, fostering collaboration in the field of health technology. To support this initiative, Oglesby will be developing marketing content, including a dedicated website and articles, to effectively promote and showcase the seminar series.
Boris Vabson
Senior Economist, Dep of Healthcare Policy, CCB, HMS
Boris Vabson is a senior economist at CCB at Harvard Medical School, as well as a fellow at HMS’s Department of Health Care Policy. Boris is an applied health economist who leverages large-scale data, natural experiments, and cutting edge statistical tools to study policy and business relevant topics in healthcare. His research focuses on health insurance systems and markets, with a particular focus on Medicaid and Medicare. Using causal inference methods, Boris’s research quantifies the actual, causal impact of different health insurance features on important outcomes of interest. His research has been published in leading economics, medical, and policy journals.
At CCB, Boris conducts independent research leveraging the Center’s unique health insurance data assets. He also collaborates on academic research with other center members as well as the broader Harvard community. Finally, he supports the center’s work through subject matter expertise around health care data and institutions.
Prior to Harvard, Boris held an academic appointment at Stanford University. Boris received his Ph.D. in Applied Economics from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and was also a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at NBER. He received his AB from Dartmouth in Economics and Mathematics. Alongside his academic work, Boris serves as an advisor to leading payer, provider, and healthcare technology companies, as well as entrepreneur in the health tech space.
Anthony Christidis
Computational Scientist, CCB, HMS
Dr. Anthony Christidis is a Computational Scientist at the Center for Computational Biomedicine at Harvard Medical School where he is a member of multiple research teams. Originally from Canada, he earned his PhD in Statistical Machine Learning from the University of British Columbia (UBC) and a MSc in the same field from the University of Toronto. During his doctoral studies, he developed a new ensemble learning framework to model high-dimensional data which resulted in multiple publications in computational statistics journals. Following his PhD, Dr. Christidis was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Statistics at UBC where he developed new robust computational methods for the analysis of multi-omics data. He has also taught undergraduate and graduate courses in probability, statistics, data science and signal processing at UBC. Dr. Christidis regularly publishes software libraries implementing the statistical and computational methods he develops, and he has held various software development jobs in research institutes and in collaboration with the private sector. His research interests include machine learning, optimization, scientific computing, and the application of computational methods to single-cell and RNA-seq data.