In my 25 years of being involved with biomedical projects as first an academic biostatistician and later an entrepreneur, I have seen projects that change the face of medicine and others that ruin careers. One theme has shown up across the board- if you don't consider data and data analysis a priority it can sink your project.

In this talk I will describe the typical ‘data science’ project in biotechnology. Using stories and examples from my career working on projects from a huge array of biomedical disciplines, I will show how successful projects develop strong and robust data pipelines, while those that fail tend to think of the data as a secondary concern. For the biotech start-ups, and more mature biotech firms, these examples might help you avoid failing to achieve your milestones and improve your R&D to be more efficient and save you money.

Note this is an academic talk and NOT a sales promotion.

Bill Shannon, PhD, MBA

Founder and Managing Partner (Analytics), BioRankings

Professor Emeritus of Biostatistics in Medicine, Washington Univ. in St Louis

Bill is a biostatistician whose initial training was in the field of zoology and the use of rigorous mathematical analysis of biological data using clustering and classification methods. As President of BioRankings and the former Director of the Washington University Dept. of Medicine’s Biostatistical Consulting Center, he has significant experience supervising MS and PhD level staff members on statistical methods research and who provide statistical consulting support to investigators from many areas of medicine (e.g., pediatrics, oncology, pulmonology, infectious disease, neurology, and cardiology) and basic science (e.g., genetics, immunology, pathology). In addition Bill has been funded to develop novel methods for analysis of Big Data in metagenomics, connectomics, graphical data objects, and wearable devices. Bill has led big data projects for 20 years as a tenured professor at Washington Univ. School of Medicine and President of BioRankings, and has authored and co-authored 140+ peer-reviewed papers, has led data analysis R&D on both big data and small data projects in clinical and pre-clinical research, and has repeatedly been able to solve data analysis problems his clients could not solve. Bill received an MBA in 2012 to help develop data analysis solutions for business clients. As of June 2016, Bill retired from Washington University as a Professor Emeritus and is now full time at BioRankings.

www.biorankings.com