Subha Madhavan, PhD
Chief Data Scientist, Associate Dean, Health Informatics & Data Science, Associate Professor of Oncology and Biomedical Informatics
Dr. Madhavan is the Director of the Innovation Center for Biomedical Informatics (ICBI) at the Georgetown University Medical Center, and Associate Professor in the Department of Oncology. She is also the Chief Data Scientist for the Georgetown University Medical Center with responsibility for all data-related research initiatives. For her research on brain tumors to collect, standardize and analyze patient information in the Repository for Molecular BRAin Neoplasia DaTa (REMBRANDT), she was awarded the top federal employee recognition of Service to America (SAMMIES) medal in the Science and Environment category. Dr. Madhavan has led many programs in health data science, clinical informatics and health IT with responsibility for several biomedical research efforts including the software development of Georgetown Database of Cancer (G-DOC) a resource for both researchers and clinicians to realize the goals of personalized medicine and leadership of Lombardi Cancer Center’s Biostatistics and Bioinformatics shared resource. She was co-PI of the data coordination center for The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), which managed and analyzed high dimensional genomic data of approximately 100 TB over a period of 3 years and pioneered many data management, visualization and integration strategies for TCGA data and the way scientists around the world access and use this dataset today. She developed honest broker services for access to over 4 million patient records from 10 MedStar Health hospitals, Howard University Hospital and VA-DC to drive clinical and translational research. She was the PI on the Breast and Colon Cancer Family Registries data center that coordinated public health and epidemiology data across 12 sites in the US, Australia, and Canada. She was co-PI on the NCI’s In Silico Research Centers of Excellence that developed systems biology tools to study endocrine resistant breast cancers. Dr. Madhavan collaborates with cloud computing and HPC providers to develop next generation computing platforms for high dimensional datasets including next generation sequencing, transcriptomics, epigenetics and clinical datasets. She co-chairs the ClinGen Somatic working group and leads a group of 40 cancer research organizations in the United States to develop guidelines for standardized somatic mutation reporting from clinical labs. Through ClinGen, she contributes to the GA4GH (Global Alliance for Genomic Health), Data Science Africa and other international research networks. She has contributed to novel information sciences findings in research articles published in journals such as Nature, Bioinformatics, Molecular and Cell Biology (MCB), AJPM, Frontiers in Oncology, Bioinformatics, Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO), Clinical Cancer Research (CCR), Cancer Informatics, and Molecular Cancer Research (MCR). As a recognition of her scholarship in informatics, she was recently inducted to the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) as a fellow in 2018.
Dr. Madhavan has a Master’s degree in Computer Information Systems from University of Maryland and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Biological Sciences from the Uniformed Services University for the Health Sciences through a highly ranked Indo-US Collaborative program. She received post-doctoral training in computational biology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
View a complete list of her publications on Google Scholar.