Dr. Sam Volchenboum is the Director of the Center for Research Informatics at the University of Chicago, a board-certified pediatric hematologist and oncologist, and the co-founder of Litmus Health, a data science platform for early-stage clinical trials.

Dr. Volchenboum was drawn to computers and learned to program at a young age. Despite choosing medicine instead of computer science, he has found novel ways to use technology to enhance medical care, bringing new data-driven approaches to the field.

After an MD and PhD in molecular biology from the Mayo Clinic, he continued his medical career with a residency at Cincinnati Children’s Medical Center where rotations in oncology and stem cell transplant solidified his interest in treating children with cancer and passion for research in neuroblastoma. After completing a clinical fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital, he continued to see patients while participating in their electronic medical record implementation.

Frustrated with the inefficiencies he observed in clinical care and medical research, he began developing new tools for collecting, processing, and managing data to augment care, improve safety, and enhance physician and patient satisfaction – all before receiving any formal training in medical informatics.

Dr. Volchenboum went on to formalize his data science training with a Master’s in Biomedical Informatics from MIT and Harvard Medical School and now is a faculty member at the University of Chicago as Director of the Center for Research Informatics, a nationally recognized group that helps academia acquire, analyze, manage, and store data to streamline their research projects.

He is also leveraging his experience at the intersection of research and bioinformatics as the scientific co-founder of Litmus Health, a company that helps drug development researchers make better go and no-go decisions from a patient’s environment, lifestyle, diet, and activity.