Tempus, a technology company advancing precision medicine through the practical application of artificial intelligence in healthcare, today announced that Christopher Mason, PhD, has joined as the Vice President of Emerging Genome Technology. Dr. Mason has been a pioneer in next-generation sequencing (NGS) diagnostics, multi-omic approaches to modeling disease, and many new biochemical, genomic, and metagenomics methods. He will bring his skills and experience to this role, which is especially relevant as Tempus works to help address the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, he will develop and advise on the cutting-edge technologies needed for NGS profiling, host responses to COVID-19, and computational methods for linking clinical metadata to multi-omic trajectories in patients, which will enable improved stratification of patient risk and treatment options.
Dr. Mason joins Tempus from Weill Cornell Medicine, where he is an Associate Professor of Genomics, Physiology, and Biophysics, as well as the Director of the WorldQuant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction. There, his research and clinical breakthroughs have had significant impact in many areas, spanning cancer epigenetics, infectious disease, clonal hematopoiesis, NASA astronauts, neuroscience, synthetic biology, and undiagnosed diseases. His experience creating and deploying novel techniques in next generation sequencing for tumor evolution, genome evolution, DNA and RNA modifications, and cellular engineering will continue to advance Tempus’ existing work in this area across multiple diseases.
“Chris is joining the company at a pivotal time as we quickly expand into infectious diseases,” said Kevin White, Chief Science Officer of Tempus. “This is a new role at Tempus, but I’m confident that his extensive experience will allow him to dive in and continue to drive innovation across our numerous scientific areas.”
“Tempus has created an incredibly diverse and talented team, and I look forward to joining their ranks at a time of unprecedented growth and innovation,” said Dr. Mason. “They are aggregating the largest set of clinical and molecular data in the world, and the ability to learn from these data to improve and save lives is extraordinary.”
Dr. Mason has won the NIH’s Transformative R01 Award, the NASA Group Achievement Award, and the CDC Honor Award for Standardization of Clinical Testing, among others. He completed his dual B.S. in Genetics and Biochemistry from University of Wisconsin-Madison, his Ph.D. in Genetics from Yale University, and his post-doctoral training in clinical genetics at Yale Medical School, while jointly completing a post-doctoral Fellow of Genomics, Ethics, and Law at Yale Law School. Dr. Mason is also an affiliate of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Rockefeller University, Harvard Medical School, and Yale Law School.
About Tempus
Tempus is a technology company advancing precision medicine through the practical application of artificial intelligence in healthcare. With one of the world’s largest libraries of clinical and molecular data, and an operating system to make that data accessible and useful, Tempus enables physicians to make real-time, data-driven decisions to deliver personalized patient care and in parallel facilitates discovery, development and delivery of optimal therapeutics. The goal is for each patient to benefit from the treatment of others who came before by providing physicians with tools that learn as the company gathers more data. For more information, visit tempus.com.