Director and Professor
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona
– United States
Dr. Ken Buetow is a human genetics and genomics researcher who leverages computational tools to
understand complex traits such as cancer, liver disease, and obesity. Dr. Buetow currently serves as
Director of Computational Sciences and Informatics program for Complex Adaptive Systems at Arizona
State University (CAS@ASU), is a professor in the School of Life Sciences in ASU’s College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences; is a Core Faculty, in ASU’s Center for Evolution and Medicine; and is Director of
Bioinformatics and Data Management for the National Biomarker Development Alliance.
The Buetow laboratory undertakes its mission through a systems approach in which genetic analytic
methods are applied to clinical and multiple high‐throughput molecular characterizations integrated
through informatics. It approaches diseases such as cancer as a complex adaptive system. The
laboratory has a long history of developing and applying bioinformatics methods to find genetic
components underlying complex traits. In early work with genome‐wide gene sequence data, the
laboratory developed approaches to computationally identify variants. More recently, the analytic
approaches have been extended to systematically identify insertion/deletion variation, translocations, and
rearrangements in genome and transcriptome data. In a complementary approach, the laboratory is
developing and applying methods that map phenotypes to canonical biological process networks.
Application of these approaches using genome‐wide gene data indicate they have the capacity to
objectively identify networks universally altered in multiple cancer types or networks that drive
components of individual cancer phenotypes.
Dr. Buetow previously served as the founding Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics and
Information Technology within the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute (NCI).
Thursday, November 7
4:13 PM – 4:30 PM