Michael L. Whitfield, PhD
Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth
Bio
Dr. Whitfield is Chair and Professor of Biomedical Data Science, and Professor of Molecular & Systems Biology at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. He is Co-Director of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Big Data in the Life Sciences Training Program, which promotes integration of the experimental and population sciences, cross-training students to be equally comfortable in the computational sciences as they are at the bench.
Dr. Whitfield’s research is focused on development of gene expression biomarkers, mining big data, systems biology and genomic networks in systemic autoimmune disease. He has focused his research on understanding the heterogeneity in and identifying novel therapeutic targets for systemic sclerosis (SSc) and in applying this information to better treat patients with the disease.
He was the first to identify the intrinsic gene expression subsets in SSc skin, which are now being used in SSc clinical trials. Multi-tissue networks developed by his group have demonstrated consistent, deregulated processes across end-target tissues in SSc, pulmonary fibrosis (PF) and pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), suggesting an immune-fibrotic axis is a key driver of SSc pathogenesis.
