Daniel Himmelstein

Dr. Himmelstein is a leader in the areas of open data licensing and open science. Using open resources, he carried out a research project that aims to find new uses for existing drugs entirely in the open (https://thinklab.com/p/rephetio), and his predictions are freely available to the scientific community at http://het.io/repurpose/. A recent article in Nature highlighted his struggles with data licensing during this project (https://doi.org/bndt).

Not content with simply performing open science in an ivory tower, Dr. Himmelstein has engaged with the Philadelphia tech community. Since arriving he has launched Project Cognoma, a citizen-science project to enable every cancer biologist to apply sophisticated machine learning algorithms to large public cancer genomics datasets. This project has been run in collaboration with Code for Philly and DataPhilly, and Daniel has spearheaded the operation.