Scientific Sense ®

Causes of chronic liver diseases, emerging treatments, COVID-19 Dr. Scott Friedman is the Dean for Therapeutic Discovery and Chief of the Division of Liver Diseases, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He has performed pioneering research into the underlying causes of scarring, or fibrosis associated with chronic liver disease, affecting millions worldwide. His work has spawned an entire field that is now realizing its translational and therapeutic potential, with new anti-fibrotic therapies for liver disease reaching clinical trials.

Evolution of cancer, plague, pandemics, COVID, policymaking under uncertainty Jeffrey Townsend is the Elihu Professor of Biostatistics and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale University. He is an experimentalist and a theoretician; someone who performed the first experiments to show how extensively genome-wide gene expression varies in one individual organism to another within a population; who has developed theory to reveal not just what is known, but what is unknown and unknowable in how organisms have descended from their ancestors; who has pioneered both experimental and theoretical approaches enabling us to understand the evolutionary changes that give an organism its form, function, and ability to survive and propagate. Currently, he spends the majority of his time working on evolutionary theory applied to tumor genome sequencing, revealing how cancer evolves from normal tissue to malignant tissue—how cancer evolves within us.

Decisions under uncertainty, shocks, supply chains, and autonomous vehicles Prof Warren Powell taught at Princeton for almost 40 years, where he was drawn to the opportunity of bringing advanced analytics to the trucking industry which introduced him to the challenge of making high-dimensional decisions (such as assigning drivers to loads) under uncertainty.  This problem guided a lifetime of research in stochastic optimization using approximate dynamic programming. His research produced over 250 papers and two books with the help of 60 graduate students and post-docs, supported by $50 million in research funding.

Democratizing our data - A manifesto. Improving the design of metrics, collection of data, analysis and decision-making at the federal level Prof. Julia Lane is a Professor at the New York University Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and an NYU Fellow for Innovation Analytics. She is a senior advisor in the Office of the Federal CIO at the White House, supporting the implementation of the Federal Data Strategy. She cofounded the Coleridge Initiative, whose goal is to use data to transform the way governments access and use data for the social good through training programs, research projects, and a secure data facility.

Humans, bacteria, intelligence, consciousness, life and everything else Ian Williams was born in England in 1954. He trained as a biochemist at the Universities of Bristol and Oxford and received an MFA from Bennington College in Vermont. He worked for Pfizer for twenty years heading the Molecular Sciences Department and serving in the Research strategy group. He and his wife, Nancy Hutson, have a farm in Connecticut containing over 50 large-scale sculptures that Williams has made over the last decade. Together with Nancy, he has ridden in horseback safaris in many parts of the world. He may be reached at ian.inc@mac.com

COVID-19, clinical trial processes, pharmaceutical R&D, vaccine development, use of preventative medications, Alzheimer's disease, PTSD After obtaining his medical degree in Belgium in 1972, Pierre Etienne moved to McGill University, where he did postgraduate work in neurochemistry. There he directed a program on the biochemical, physiological, and neuropathological basis of Alzheimer's disease. After a brief passage in experimental medicine at Ciba-Geigy (now Novartis), he went back to McGill in 1987, dividing his time between the Montreal Neurological Institute and the Allan Memorial Institute. In 1989 he joined Pfizer as Director of Experimental Medicine, responsible for all Phase 2 A programs for US and Japan discovered compounds. In 2003, he became CEO of PhageTech, Inc., a privately-held biotechnology company based in Montreal, Canada. PhageTech exploited a proprietary platform based on phage-bacterial intracellular interactions to research and develop new classes of synthetic antibiotics. Phagetech later became Targanta Therapeutics that went public on NASDAQ (TARG) in the summer of 2008. In December 2009, he started a new life as a physician at the Douglas Institute. In July 2011, he was appointed Director of the Clinical Research Division. He is the co-Director of the Alzheimer’s disease prevention program (Stop-AD).