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DR. GIL ALTEROVITZ
The MIT Technology Review article:
A Musical Score for Disease said
Converting genetic activity into music may be a way to monitor health.
When set to music, colon cancer sounds kind of eerie. That's the finding
of Gil Alterovitz, a research fellow at Harvard Medical School who is
developing a computer program that translates protein and gene
expression into music. In his acoustic translation, harmony represents
good health, and discord indicates disease.
At any given time in each of our cells, thousands of genes are churning
out their molecular products while thousands more lie senescent. The
profile of which genes are on versus off is constantly changing
— with
specific diseases such as cancer, for example.
Searching for a more simplified way to represent the complex library of
information inherent in gene expression, Alterovitz decided to represent
those changes with music. He hopes that doctors will one day be able to
use his music to detect health-related changes in gene expression early
via a musical slip into discord, potentially improving a patient's
outcome.
Gil Alterovitz, Ph.D. is at the Harvard/MIT Health Sciences and
Technology Division Children's Hospital Informatics Program (CHIP). He
is also affiliated with the Department of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and
Harvard Medical School Partners' Center for Genetics and Genomics
(HPCGG).
Gil's research interests involve development of novel,
interdisciplinary approaches that bridge engineering and medicine.
Specifically, he is involved in developing methods for studying
biological networks and signal processing within proteomics. He
initiated the Proteomics and Cellular Network Engineering Grouplet. His
work has been published or presented in more than two dozen places-
ranging from academic journals and books to international conferences.
He wrote the "Proteomics"
section for the
Wiley Encyclopedia of Biomedical Engineering
(2006). He is editor of the new text:
Systems Bioinformatics: An
Engineering Case-Based Approach (2007).
Gil has a special interest in spanning the engineering and biological
domains in his research and publications. As part of his research, he
also initiated collaborations with Mathworks (makers of Matlab) and
Microsoft.
He is active in research, initiating collaborative efforts, teaching,
and mentoring. In 2005, he co-directed
HST.480/6.092 with Prof. M. Ramoni and Prof.
M. Kellis. That year, he was also an invited lecturer for graduate
courses at Harvard Medical School, MIT, and Boston University. He has
served as a research mentor for students from several universities
including Harvard, MIT, Boston University, and Northeastern University.
Recently, one of these mentored projects resulted in a national award
for the student.
Gil authored
Electrical Engineering and Nontechnical Design Variables of Multiple
Inductive Loop Systems for Auditoriums,
and coauthored
Proteomics,
Automation, parallelism, and robotics for proteomics,
Human Protein Meta-Interaction Database (HPMD) Potentiates
Integration
for Meta-Analysis,
Characterizing Human Protein Mass Density Distributions,
The Human Massome of Protein Interactions: A New
Mass Spectrometry-Based Perspective,
Temporal patient state characterization using iterative order and
noise
(ION) estimation: applications to anesthesia patient monitoring,
and
A New Magnetic North: How Canada Can Attract and Retain Young
Talent.
Gil earned a Ph.D. in Electrical and Biomedical Engineering
at MIT. As a graduate student, he was awarded multiple fellowships,
including the Whitaker Graduate Fellowship and the National Defense
Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. His Ph.D. thesis focused
on
Bayesian and signal processing methods with applications in proteomics.
He earned a M.S. degree at MIT in Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science, where his thesis involved developing the Temporal
Patient State Characterization method for clinical monitoring.
He is also a
graduate from Carnegie Mellon University with a B.S. degree in
Electrical and Computer Engineering and a minor in Biomedical
Engineering.
A Fulbright winner, he spent a year in Canada (with the University of
Toronto as his host institution) where he worked with Prof. C.W. Hogue
on proteomics research as well as on studying US/Canada-related issues.
In 2001, he was selected as one of approximately 20 international
delegates to the
Canada25 forum (to discuss healthcare/technology)
covered by national CBC radio, a national TV special, and Canada's
Maclean's.
Watch
A Musical Score for Disease.
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