Bio & press kit
For event hosts, editors, and collaborators.
Short bio
Sean Davis, MD, PhD, is Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Informatics and Rifkin Bennis Chair of Cancer Informatics at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, and Associate Director for Informatics and Data Science at the University of Colorado Cancer Center. Trained in engineering, human genetics, and pediatric oncology, he has spent almost two decades building open software and data infrastructure for biomedical research, has held leadership roles in the Bioconductor project since 2008, and teaches data science and AI in medicine.
Long bio
Sean Davis, MD, PhD, is Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Informatics at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, where he holds the Rifkin Bennis Chair of Cancer Informatics and is Associate Director for Informatics and Data Science at the University of Colorado Cancer Center. He studied mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University and earned his MD and a PhD in human genetics at the University of Pittsburgh. He trained in pediatrics at the University of Washington and in pediatric hematology/oncology in the combined Johns Hopkins and National Cancer Institute fellowship, and is board certified in pediatrics. From 2005 to 2020 he was at the National Institutes of Health, at the National Human Genome Research Institute and then the National Cancer Institute’s Center for Cancer Research.
His research has ranged across pediatric cancer genomics, gene regulation, the human microbiome, and the design and evaluation of biomedical data ecosystems, and more recently the adoption of AI in academic medicine. A common thread is building the shared infrastructure that lets other scientists use public data: open-source software downloaded by more than 50,000 users a year, work on NIH’s Biowulf and CU Anschutz’s Alpine research computing environments, and national efforts including the NCI Cancer Cloud Pilots, the NHGRI AnVIL project, and the NIH Common Fund Data Ecosystem.
He has held leadership roles in the Bioconductor project since 2008. He served on its Technical Advisory Board from 2008 to 2020, organized or co-organized its annual conference from 2008 to 2021, edits the F1000Research Bioconductor channel, and in 2026 led the move of bioconductor.org to new web infrastructure.
He has taught for more than twenty years. Since 2013 he has been a senior instructor and organizer of the Statistical Methods for Functional Genomics course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and he directs Frontiers of AI in Medicine, a course for medical students at CU Anschutz. He is the author of the open textbook Data Science for Biologists.
Talks
Slides and materials from recent talks are at talks.seandavis.net, and the CV lists selected invited presentations. If you have a topic in mind, include it in your invitation.
Contact
For speaking invitations and collaboration, email seandavi@gmail.com.