prof. Søren Brunak, MSc, PhD, dr. phil. h. c. 

Dr. Brunak is a professor and Research Director at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research, as well as the Department of Public Health, at the University of Copenhagen Medical School. He is a leading expert in bioinformatics, disease systems biology, and medical informatics through invention and introduction of new machine learning strategies for analysis and integration of biological and clinical data (first machine learning publication in 1988). Together with Prof. Pierre Baldi he published the first textbook on bioinformatics and machine learning in 1998 (MIT Press). In his research the use of the patient trajectory concept is a major theme that exploits EHR and registry information on the patient-past in terms of prior diseases, comorbidities, prescriptions, lab values, omics data, wearable data, socio-economic data among other types of data.

Dr. Brunak’s research combines scientific disciplines in novel ways, including computer technology (supercomputer hardware, data protection techniques and software including machine learning techniques), biological, biomedical and biotechnological insights. Dr. Brunak has been chairing the Research and Infrastructure committee of the Danish National Genome Center, a state agency that manages a single, national repository where all whole genome sequencing data from the Danish healthcare sector by law is mandated to be kept for subsequent use within treatment and research. He is a member of many SABs, including at the UK Biobank and HDR UK. Dr. Brunak has been a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences since 2016, the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters since 2004 and the European Molecular Biology Organization since 2009.