PLENARY III: Applying Data Science to Advance Translational Neurotrauma Research

Presenter

Adam R. Ferguson, PhD
Associate Professor
Weill Institute for Neurosciences, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)

Session Description

In this Plenary, Dr. Adam Ferguson will share his innovative work at the interface of data science and neurotrauma, including VISION-SCI, a community data repository, that hosts subject-level data from over 4000 rodents with SCI and Open Data Commons for SCI (odc-sci.org) and TBI (odc-tbi.org), a cloud-based data infrastructure designed to accelerate progress in pre-clinical SCI and TBI research through data sharing and re-using. His current work in large-scale clinical projects will also be discussed, including a multicenter prospective Transforming Research and Clinical Knowledge in Traumatic Brain Injury (TRACK-TBI) and SCI (TRACK-SCI) studies, and TBI Endpoints Development (TED) Initiative.

Learning Objectives

• • Describe the complex and heterogenous nature of neurotrauma and associated big-data challenges in research and new discoveries
  • Describe the potential of harnessing big data to drive reproducibility and translation in neurotrauma research
  • Discuss the utility of leveraging data science in advancing translational research in neurotrauma and its clinical implications

About the Presenter

Adam R. Ferguson, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Brain and Spinal Injury Center at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital; and jointly appointed Principal Investigator at the San Francisco VA Healthcare System. His interests span basic neuroscience to large-scale clinical data science and precision medicine. He directs a translational data-science research team as well as a bench-based neuroscience laboratory focused on neurotrauma. He also serves as founding principal investigator, and co-director of multicenter cloud-based open data commons efforts for spinal cord injury (odc-sci.org) and traumatic brain injury (odc-tbi.org). He also serves as principal data scientist in the VA Gordon Mansfield Spinal Cord Injury Consortium, a federated translational modeling project; and a core member of large-scale clinical precision medicine research projects known as Transforming Research And Clinical Knowledge for TBI (TRACK-TBI) and SCI (TRACK-SCI). Together these data assets represent over 10,000 individuals, representing multiple species tracked on over 20,000 biological/clinical variables + genomics + high-resolution imaging. He has substantial experience leveraging cloud technologies for neuroscience data management and analytics to support new discoveries in both basic neurobiology and clinical science. He has produced more than 125 published papers in preclinical and clinical research.