How Data and Computing Can Change Medicine in the Exascale Era

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Gina Tourassi, Biomedical Group Leader, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

In this video, Gina Tourassi from ORNL explains how data and computing is changing medicine.

Exascale computing infrastructure such as Frontier will be the paradigm shift because we can bring all of the data together and analyze it in a time efficient way,” said Tourassi.

Georgia (Gina) Tourassi received a B.S. degree in physics from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Duke University. She joined ORNL in 2011 as the director of the Biomedical Sciences and Engineering Center after a long academic career in the department of radiology and the medical physics graduate program at Duke University Medical Center. She is currently distinguished research scientist, director of the Health Data Sciences Institute (HDSI), and group leader of the Biomedical Science, Engineering, and Computing (BSEC) group at ORNL. As institute director, Dr. Tourassi develops and manages its strategic agenda, scientific priorities, and roadmap while still leading her independent research activities. In addition, she is adjunct professor of radiology at Duke University and the University of Tennessee Graduate School of Medicine, joint UT-ORNL faculty of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and the Bredesen Center.

In her leadership roles at ORNL, Dr. Tourassi works methodically to raise ORNL’s presence and role in the biomedical sciences domain. To date, she has organized three highly successful annual biomedical conferences at ORNL and built strategic partnerships with prestigious biomedical institutions. Dr. Tourassi presents and advocates regularly ORNL’s biomedical research and health data sciences portfolio to DOE, NIH, VA, FDA, medical societies, the Tennessee Department of Health, and academic institutions. She reports annually to ORNL’s Scientific Advisory Board and led the Human Health Committee of the Big Science Questions exercise at ORNL. In the past few years she has been directly involved with the DOE-NCI and DOE-VA partnerships announced by Vice President Biden in 2016 on the deployment of exascale computing to enable precision medicine advances for cancer and the US Veterans. For her leadership in the Joint Design of Advanced Computing Solutions for Cancer initiative, she received the DOE Secretary’s Appreciation Award in 2016 and the HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Award for “Best Use of AI” in 2017. In addition, in 2017 Dr. Tourassi received the ORNL Director’s Award for Outstanding Individual Accomplishment in Science and Technology and the UT-Battelle Distinguished Researcher Award.

Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter