Science & Medicine Pioneer
Eric Schadt
Precision Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine
Eric Schadt is a mathematician and computational biologist, the Dean for Precision Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and founder and CEO of Sema4, a Mount Sinai Health System startup that provides advanced genomic testing and merges big data analytics with clinical diagnostics. He was previously founding director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology and chair of the Department of Genetics and Genomics Sciences at Mount Sinai.
Schadt is an expert on the generation and integration of very large-scale sequence variation, molecular profiling, and clinical data in disease populations for constructing molecular networks that define disease states and link molecular biology to physiology. He is known for calling for a shift in molecular biology toward a network-oriented view of living systems to complement the reductionist, single-gene approaches that currently dominate biology in order to more accurately model the complexity of biological systems.
“There are companies today that claim access to millions of patient records. But from the standpoint of what we intend to do, the data is meaningless. It’s often inaccurate, incomplete, and not easily linked across systems,” Schadt said in an interview with WIRED, explaining Sema4’s focus on acquiring and expanding companies that specialize in genetic testing in order to collect and share millions of individual data sets. “Plus, that data doesn’t typically include access to DNA or to the genomic data generated on their DNA.”
Schadt has authored or co-authored more than 350 peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals, including Nature Genetics, Nature Biotechnology, and Molecular Systems Biology. He is also executive producer and creative director of the documentary “The New Biology,” which won a Cine Master Series Award in 2012.
Schadt was named on the list of "The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds" (2014) by Thomson Reuters and is the recipient of the Spirit of Rustum Roy Spirit Award (2014).