Computational Biology Pioneer Lawrence Hunter Joins Sage Bionetworks’ Board of Directors
SEATTLE, WA, UNITED STATES, October 20, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Sage Bionetworks is pleased to welcome Lawrence (Larry) Hunter, PhD, to its Board of Directors.
Hunter is a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Chicago, where he moved in 2024 after 23 years at the University of Colorado. He helped build computational biology as a field. In 1997 he founded the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) and served as its president until 2000, and he is a founder of two of the field’s major conferences, Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) and the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB).
His recent research focuses on biomedical knowledge graphs and how they can work alongside large language models. He was senior author on the paper describing PheKnowLator, an open-source knowledge graph ecosystem for the life sciences, and co-authored “Desiderata for a biomedical knowledge network,” which came out of the NIH Knowledge Graph Working Group. His group also built an “ignorance base,” a system for mining what the scientific literature says is not yet known.
“I am delighted by this appointment as the culmination of my long relationship with Sage. I’m excited to help this unique organization continue to thrive,” Hunter says. “I’m grateful for the opportunity to support its critically important mission in open science and radical collaboration.”
“Larry helped create the field that Sage works in, and his research goes right to a question underneath much of what we are building now: how to keep what a model produces tied to what is known and verifiable,” says Luca Foschini, PhD, President & CEO of Sage Bionetworks. “We are thrilled to welcome him to the Board.”
Hunter joins Sage’s existing Board of Directors:
- Stephen H. Friend, MD, PhD: Board Chair & Sage Bionetworks Co-Founder
- Eric Schadt, PhD: Director & Sage Bionetworks Co-Founder
- Luca Foschini, PhD: President & CEO
- Jennifer Goldsack, MChem, MA, MBA, OLY: Interim Treasurer
- Brian J. Fox: Director
- Carole Goble, CBE, FREng, FBCS, CITP: Director
- Andrea Varsavsky, PhD: Board Secretary (non-voting member)
Hunter is a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Chicago, where he moved in 2024 after 23 years at the University of Colorado. He helped build computational biology as a field. In 1997 he founded the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) and served as its president until 2000, and he is a founder of two of the field’s major conferences, Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) and the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB).
His recent research focuses on biomedical knowledge graphs and how they can work alongside large language models. He was senior author on the paper describing PheKnowLator, an open-source knowledge graph ecosystem for the life sciences, and co-authored “Desiderata for a biomedical knowledge network,” which came out of the NIH Knowledge Graph Working Group. His group also built an “ignorance base,” a system for mining what the scientific literature says is not yet known.
“I am delighted by this appointment as the culmination of my long relationship with Sage. I’m excited to help this unique organization continue to thrive,” Hunter says. “I’m grateful for the opportunity to support its critically important mission in open science and radical collaboration.”
“Larry helped create the field that Sage works in, and his research goes right to a question underneath much of what we are building now: how to keep what a model produces tied to what is known and verifiable,” says Luca Foschini, PhD, President & CEO of Sage Bionetworks. “We are thrilled to welcome him to the Board.”
Hunter joins Sage’s existing Board of Directors:
- Stephen H. Friend, MD, PhD: Board Chair & Sage Bionetworks Co-Founder
- Eric Schadt, PhD: Director & Sage Bionetworks Co-Founder
- Luca Foschini, PhD: President & CEO
- Jennifer Goldsack, MChem, MA, MBA, OLY: Interim Treasurer
- Brian J. Fox: Director
- Carole Goble, CBE, FREng, FBCS, CITP: Director
- Andrea Varsavsky, PhD: Board Secretary (non-voting member)
Mackenzie Wildman
Sage Bionetworks
communications@sagebionetworks.org
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