Søren Brunak

Søren Brunak, Ph.D., is professor of Disease Systems Biology at the University of Copenhagen, and has also worked as Medical Informatics officer at Rigshospitalet, Capital Region of Denmark. Prof. Brunak was the founding Director of the Center for Biological Sequence Analysis at Technical University of Denmark, which was formed in 1993 as a multi-disciplinary research group of molecular biologists, biochemists, medical doctors, physicists, and computer scientists. Søren Brunak has been highly active within multi-modal data integration, where AI and machine learning techniques often have been used to integrate predicted or experimentally established functional genome, metagenome and proteome annotation. In 2007 he co-founded, with Matthias Mann, the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research at the Medical School of the University of Copenhagen. His group has recently also been affiliated with the Dept. of Public Health at the Medical School. His current research does combine molecular level systems biology and healthcare sector data such as electronic patient records and biobank questionnaires. The aim is to group and stratify patients not only from their genotype, but also phenotypically based on the clinical descriptions in the medical records. One of the key elements driving the approaches is the "disease trajectory" concept, where phenotypes and their complications are analyzed in a life-long perspective rather than as individual diagnoses.