Dennis Wall
Professor of Pediatrics (Systems Medicine), of Biomedical Data Science and, by courtesy, of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University
Dr. Dennis P. Wall is Professor of Pediatrics, Psychiatry and Biomedical Data Sciences at Stanford Medical School. He leads a lab in Pediatric Innovation focused on developing methods in biomedical informatics to disentangle complex conditions that originate in childhood and perpetuate through the life course, including autism and related developmental delays. For over a decade, first on faculty at Harvard and now at Stanford University, and as healthcare has shifted increasingly to the use of digital technologies for data capture and finer resolutions of genomic scale, Dr. Wall has innovated, adapted and deployed bioinformatic strategies to enable precise and personalized interpretation of high resolution molecular and phenotypic data. Dr. Wall has pioneered the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence for fast, quantitative and mobile detection of neurodevelopmental disorders in children, as well as the use of use of machine learning systems on wearable devices, such as Google Glass, for real-time “exclinical" therapy. These same precision health approaches enable quantitative tracking of progress during treatment throughout an individual’s life enabling big data generation of a type and scale never before possible, and have defined a new paradigm for behavioral detection and therapy that has won Dr. Wall several awards including a spot in the top ten of the World’s top 30 autism researchers. Dr. Wall has acted as science advisor to several biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, has created and advised on cutting-edge approaches to cloud computing, and has received numerous awards, including the Fred R. Cagle Award for Outstanding Achievement in Biology, the Vice Chancellor's Award for Research, three awards for excellence in teaching, the Harvard Medical School Leadership award, and the Slifka/Ritvo Clinical Innovation in Autism Research Award for outstanding advancements in clinical translation. He completed his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley and a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship in Computational Genetics at Stanford University before joining the faculty at Harvard Medical School.