biology

Russ Altman

Russ Altman is a biology topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Russ Altman rather than just read about it. In short: Russ Biagio Altman is an American professor of bioengineering, genetics, medicine, and biomedical data science (and of computer science, by courtesy) and past chairman of the bioengineering department at Stanford University. He is also an associate director and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

Key takeaways

Russ Altman belongs to biology; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Russ Altman to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Russ Altman from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Russ Biagio Altman is an American professor of bioengineering, genetics, medicine, and biomedical data science (and of computer science, by courtesy) and past chairman of the bioengineering department at Stanford University. He is also an associate director and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

Education Altman holds an A.B. in biochemistry & molecular biology from Harvard College in 1983, a Ph.D. in medical information sciences from Stanford in 1989 and M.D. from Stanford Medical School in 1990. After his internship at Stanford, he became board certified in 1991 in internal medicine and in clinical informatics in 2014. After a year of post-doctoral research, he joined the faculty as assistant professor in 1992. He became full professor in 2004, and was chair of the department of bioengineering from 2007 to June 2012. He was the Kenneth Fong Professor of Engineering at Stanford, and an advisor to the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub from 2016- 2021. As of 2018, Altman was a founding co-editor of the Annual Review of Biomedical Data Science. As of 2021, Russ Altman was the lead editor.

Research and career His primary research interests are in the application of computing and informatics technologies to problems relevant to medicine. He is particularly interested in methods for understanding drug action at molecular, cellular, organism and population levels. His lab studies how human genetic variation impacts drug response, helping start the PharmGKB project in 2000. Other work focuses on the analysis of biological molecules to understand the actions, interactions and adverse events of drugs, publishing a database called FEATURE in 2003. He helps lead an FDA-supported center for regulatory science and innovation (CERSI). He chaired the Science Board advising the FDA Commissioner, serves on the NIH director’s advisory committee, and is co-chair of the IOM Drug Forum. He is an organizer of the annual Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. He co-founded Personalis, Inc. In 2011 along with three other faculty members including Euan Ashley, Atul Butte, Michael Snyder and businessman John West. In 2017, he started hosting a show on SiriusXM (Insight Channel 121) titled "The Future of Everything". He is clinically active with a pharmacogenomics consultative service at Stanford Healthcare.

Awards and honors Altman received the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (1997) and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award (1996). He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians (ACP), the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI), the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine) of the National Academies. He was president (2000 to 2002), founding board member, and a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), and-president of the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics (ASCPT) from March 2013 to 2014. He received the Stanford Medical School graduate teaching award in 2000, and mentorship award in 2014. In 2018, Altman was awarded the ISCB Outstanding Contributions Award. In 2020, Russ Altman received the ISCB Outstanding Contributions Award. In 2023, He won the Stanford Medicine Alumni Kornberg-Berg Lifetime Achievement Award.

External links Helix Group website at Stanford University

References

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Russ Altman

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Russ Altman claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In biology, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Russ Altman before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Russ Altman ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Russ Altman

In research: Russ Altman appears in biology research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Russ Altman in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Russ Altman is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics American bioinformaticians, Annual Reviews (publisher) editors, Fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Russ Altman outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Russ Altman in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Russ Altman means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Russ Altman out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Russ Altman in simple terms?

Why does Russ Altman matter?

Because it connects several biology ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Russ Altman?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Russ Altman.