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Appointment InformationThe strategy for and management of IDSO is steered by David Jaffray, Ph.D., Caroline Chung, M.D., and co-leads of the institute's five focus areas. With a strong focus on servant leadership, these leaders’ responsibility is to build data science capabilities across the organization – fostering ideas, securing philanthropic support and planning for operational needs to enable this growing community.
IDSO is committed to collaborating with and leveraging the expertise of our faculty, data scientists, data abstracters and researchers. To build upon our multi-disciplinary approach to cancer patient care and research, MD Anderson seeks to attract, engage with and build the best minds and collaborations in data science through IDSO.
Visit our careers site and faculty opportunities site to learn more about our openings.
David Jaffray, Ph.D.
Chief Technology and Digital Officer and Senior Vice President
Professor of Radiation Physics and Imaging Physics
Director of IDSO
Dr. Jaffray is world-renowned for pioneering state-of-the-art image-guided radiation therapy, advancing the science and practice in medical physics, and for international leadership in clinical data science for oncology. Recruited to MD Anderson in May 2019, Dr. Jaffray serves as the IDSO director and is the institution’s inaugural chief technology and digital officer, bringing more than two decades of scientific expertise and proven skill as an innovator. In this role, he directs the strategic design, acquisition, management and implementation of an enterprise-wide technology infrastructure to safeguard the integrity and availability of the institution’s systems and intellectual property assets. He and his leadership team advance data integration, data governance and data security across MD Anderson’s campuses and its national network, as well as coordinate technology-enabled innovation. He also is a professor with dual appointments for Radiation Physics and Imaging Physics.
Over the course of his career, he has played an important role in bridging the fields of biomedical engineering and medical physics. He continues to facilitate dialog and partnership between these two important disciplines and how they can tackle major health challenges worldwide. For his leadership, Dr. Jaffray was recognized in 2021 as a Fellow of the International Union for Physical and Engineering Sciences in Medicine and in 2022 as a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.
Dr. Jaffray holds 47 patents and has authored more than 300 peer-reviewed publications in cancer science and technology, including the development of new radiation treatment machines, the exploration of the fundamental limits of imaging system performance, the development of novel nanoparticle formulations for improved detection of cancer, and challenges in global health.
Caroline Chung, M.D.
Chief Data Officer and Vice President for Data Impact and Governance
Associate Professor of Radiation Oncology and Diagnostic Radiology
Director of Data Science Development and Implementation, IDSO
As the institution’s first-ever chief data officer, Dr. Chung is responsible for shaping MD Anderson’s data strategy and leading its implementation from an operational and cultural perspective. She oversees the Data Impact and Governance department and institutional data offices, as well as leads the formation of the principles, policies and programs for stewardship, advocacy and custodianship of data.
Dr. Chung holds several leadership positions to facilitate quantitative measurement and clinically impactful interpretation of data, as well as team science and collaborative imaging efforts. She serves as co-chair of the Tumor Measurement Initiative at MD Anderson, which aims to build an institutional platform for standardized, automated quantitative imaging-based tumor measurement across each patient’s journey to advance multidisciplinary, data-driven and high-precision cancer treatment.
Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Chung has been integrally involved in the establishment of the Data-Driven Determinants of COVID-19 in Oncology Discovery Effort (D3CODE) that fosters a team data science approach to aggregate and analyze data across internal and external collaborative teams. To further enable the D3CODE effort, she has been leading the development of the supporting infrastructure and data governance processes, including data provenance, quality and ontology, which has been formalized into the Data Governance Program, which she co-chairs.
Dr. Chung’s clinical practice includes the treatment of primary and secondary CNS neoplasms. Her primary research interests focus on the discovery of clinically impactful quantitative imaging biomarkers through the development of novel tools to help standard image acquisition (including the development of novel immobilization devices and imaging approaches), image processing and analysis, including the development of AI-based models.
Bissan Al-Lazikani, Ph.D.
Focus Area 3 Co-lead
Professor of Genomic Medicine
Dr. Al-Lazikani is a data scientist and drug discoverer formally trained in molecular biology and computer science with experience in academia and industry. She serves as the director of Therapeutics Data Science and co-lead for IDSO’s focus area three – Mechanism-based computational modeling and AI-augmented drug discovery and development. Prior to being recruited to MD Anderson in 2021, she was the head of Data Science at the Institute of Cancer Research, London.
Her research focus is developing AI approaches and tools to address key bottlenecks in drug discovery and development, and to discover novel therapeutics for cancer. These approaches rely on the smart integration of vast, multidisciplinary research and clinical data. She sees AI as a natural part of health care that supports and augments clinicians’ decisions and address a challenge of cancer research to drive objective, data-informed decisions across drug discovery and development, and accelerate innovative drugs to our patients.
Dr. Al-Lazikani co-led the creation of the groundbreaking ChEMBL database. Then she led the creation of the world’s largest public drug discovery knowledgebase, canSAR.ai, – integrating a vast amount of multidisciplinary data and AI-driven drug discovery analysis algorithms. CanSAR.ai, used by hundreds of thousands of researchers across the world, is now hosted at MD Anderson as part of our commitment to enable and democratize cancer drug discovery.
Dr. Al-Lazikani is a 2012 recipient of the AACR Team Science Award and in 2021 she became a CPRIT Scholar of Cancer Research and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology. She is a chartered member of the British Computing Society. In 2018, she was elected to the University of London’s Leading Women, which celebrates exceptional women by sharing stories of women leading both, by being the first, and by leading through their inspirational educational and professional achievements. She is passionate about mentoring and supporting women and underrepresented groups in science.
Jeffrey Siewerdsen, Ph.D.
Focus Area 5 Co-lead
Professor of Imaging Physics – Research
Dr. Siewerdsen, an internationally recognized physicist and biomedical engineer, joined MD Anderson in 2022. His multi-disciplinary expertise is reflected in his appointment as professor in Imaging Physics with joint appointments in Neurosurgery and Radiation Physics. In addition, he serves as the director of the Surgical Data Sciences Program and co-lead for IDSO’s focus area five – Development of automated approaches to increase access, safety, and quality in cancer care. Dr. Siewerdsen’s primary appointment is in Imaging Physics, and his research in surgical data science aims to develop and implement novel technologies and computational models in surgery. He also serves as a liaison and strategist for operations, research and education in Surgery.
Over the last two decades, Dr. Siewerdsen led the development of cone-beam CT systems for numerous applications in diagnostic and image-guided procedures. He joined Johns Hopkins in 2009, where he served as John C. Malone Professor and vice-chair in Biomedical Engineering as well as co-director of The Carnegie Center for Surgical Innovation. He founded the I-STAR Lab (Imaging for Surgery, Therapy and Radiology) as a collaboration among engineering and clinical experts, serving as a launching-pad for numerous investigators now leading independent research programs. Technologies bearing his thumbprint include cone-beam CT for surgery, interventional and diagnostic radiology, and radiation therapy as well as novel algorithms for 3D image reconstruction and multi-modality, deformable image registration.
Dr. Siewerdsen has authored more than 200 publications and is a serial inventor with over 60 granted patents in the domains of imaging, radiation oncology and surgery. He helped to coin the term “surgineering” as a new approach to education and deep collaboration among engineers and surgeons in systems engineering and data science to improve surgical safety, quality and workflow.
Yinyin Yuan, Ph.D.
Focus Area 1 Co-lead
Professor, Translational Molecular Pathology
Dr. Yuan is widely acknowledged as one of the leading experts in computational pathology. Her scientific focus is to decipher the tumor ecosystem that shapes the emergence of immune evasion and drug resistance. She has a strong track record in developing cutting-edge machine learning and data science approaches to study the dynamic crosstalk among genetically diverse cancer cells and their microenvironment.
As the co-lead for IDSO’s focus area one - Quantitative analysis and insight extraction from imaging and pathology data – Dr. Yuan is committed to building the computational infrastructure and data science capacity for pathology. She is designing impact-driven strategies to enable accelerated, rigorous, and actionable approaches for building data science capacity with translational impacts in pathology. The vision is to create a new paradigm of technological advances and multidisciplinary convergences that will lead the way to novel digital biomarkers and ultimately to the new frontier of integrated diagnostics.
Before joining MD Anderson in Oct 2022, she founded the Computational Pathology and Integrative Genomics laboratory at the institute of Cancer Research, London, in 2012. She successfully built a pioneering interface between digital pathology, data science, and cancer biology with strong clinical applications, and was awarded the title of Professor of Computational Pathology in 2021. Her team leads computational pathology in many international scientific programs and consortiums, including the Cancer Research UK program TRACERx, Sarcoma Network Accelerator, Early Detection for Smoldering Myeloma, Brain Tumour award Target-GBM, H2020 CONTRA, and the NIH Arizona Cancer Evolution Center and Breast Pre-Cancer Atlas.
