A distinguished scientist and former director at Microsoft is joining San Diego’s health intelligence company, Human Longevity, as chief data scientist.
The new recruit, Dr. David Heckerman, will lead an advanced analytics team at Human Longevity’s Mountain View office, tackling challenges in the analysis of big swaths of medical and genomic data.
Before Human Longevity, Heckerman worked at Microsoft for nearly 25 years as a scientist and director of Microsoft’s genomics arm. According to Human Longevity, Heckerman led Microsoft’s first research team to focus on machine learning, and produced the company’s first content-based spam filter. Later, he led the first research team to focus on computational biology, designing a vaccine for HIV as well as other algorithms for biology and health. For the last several years, Heckerman has led the Microsoft Genomics team, advancing research in genomics and computational biology and supporting Microsoft cloud services for genomics.
Heckerman’s background is a perfect fit for Human Longevity, which says it's building the world’s largest database of clinical, biological, and behavioral information.
The company says it is hiring more experts in computational biology, quantitative genomics, biostatistics, bioinformatics, natural language processing, and machine learning. These positions will work on Human Longevity’s genomics-powered software and other tools.
Heckerman will report to Human Longevity’s co-founder and executive chairman, J. Craig Venter.
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