SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — Dr. Atul Janardhan Butte, a trailblazing biomedical informatician and distinguished professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), has died suddenly, leaving a profound void in the fields of medicine, data science, and health innovation. He was the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Distinguished Professor and served as the inaugural director of UCSF’s Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute since 2015.

Dr. Butte, 54, was a transformative figure in computational health science whose work helped bridge the worlds of medicine, data analytics, and biotechnology. Recognized globally for his pioneering research in biomedical informatics, Butte was widely respected as both a brilliant scientist and a compassionate physician.

Born in Philadelphia to Janardhan and Mangala Butte, Atul Butte’s academic path began at Brown University, where he studied computer science as an undergraduate through the university’s Program in Liberal Medical Education. He later earned his MD from Brown’s Warren Alpert Medical School in 1995.

Following medical school, Butte completed a pediatric residency and a fellowship in pediatric endocrinology at Children’s Hospital Boston. He went on to receive a Ph.D. from the Harvard–MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology in 2004, under the mentorship of Dr. Isaac Kohane.

Dr. Butte began his academic career at Stanford University in 2005, rising to become Chief of the Division of Systems Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. He held joint appointments in pediatrics, computer science, immunology, and rheumatology before moving to UCSF in 2015.

A true innovator, Butte was known for harnessing massive publicly available biomedical datasets to make novel scientific discoveries — often without the need for traditional laboratory experiments. In a widely viewed 2012 TEDMED talk, he described how his lab used publicly accessible data and outsourced experimental validation to accelerate breakthroughs in health and medicine.

Dr. Butte authored numerous influential scientific papers and books, including one of the first guides on microarray data analysis. With an h-index exceeding 110 and over 70,000 citations, he was consistently recognized as a highly cited researcher. He also founded two biotechnology companies, Personalis and NuMedii, both focused on using big data and AI to drive drug discovery and personalized medicine.

Butte’s excellence earned him numerous accolades, including his 2013 recognition by the White House as an Open Science Champion of Change. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2015 and later honored as a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and other scientific bodies. In 2024, he received both the Award for Excellence in Molecular Diagnostics and the Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence, one of the highest honors in medical informatics.

Beyond his professional achievements, Butte was deeply devoted to his family. He lived in Menlo Park, California, with his wife, Dr. Gini Deshpande, a fellow biotech entrepreneur and CEO of NuMedii, and their daughter. His brother, Dr. Manish J. Butte, is also a prominent pediatrician and researcher at UCLA.

Dr. Butte’s passing is a significant loss to science, medicine, and the many communities he served and inspired. His visionary leadership, intellectual generosity, and unwavering commitment to advancing human health will be remembered for generations to come.

Details about memorial services and tributes are expected to be announced in the coming days.