Jessilyn Dunn
Mobilize Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow
Departments of Bioengineering and Genetics
Stanford University
Seminar Information
The healthcare landscape faces rising costs and declining health outcomes as a result of a reactive, treatment-centered medical system. In particular, cardiometabolic disease is the leading cause of death and healthcare cost worldwide. Although this condition is often preventable and treatable when detected early, its incidence continues to rise. The shift toward a proactive, prevention-based healthcare system requires precision methods to assess risk and deliver effective interventions. The long-term goal of my research is to develop precision health tools that use continuous health monitoring data to reveal changes in health status and assist medical decision-makers in delivering precision therapies and just-in-time interventions.
In this talk, I will first briefly discuss my work on integrative omics for precision cardiovascular therapies that uncovered the importance of the endothelial cell epigenome in atherosclerosis. I will then discuss our recent integrative personal omics profiling (iPOP) study of 100 individuals over the course of more than three years. This study enabled us to identify biomolecular and physiological changes that take place before, during, and after disease onset. We developed digital biomarkers from mobile health data based on personal baselines and activity habits to detect acute infection (Lyme Disease) and chronic illness (insulin resistance). Finally I will provide an outline of my ongoing and future research projects where I am developing and applying new methods to integrate large, multi-scale biomedical data (e.g. multi-omics, mobile health, and electronic health records) to enable precision healthcare for cardiometabolic disease.
Dr. Jessilyn Dunn is a Mobilize Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University in the NIH Big Data to Knowledge Mobilize Center of Excellence, where she works jointly with Drs. Scott Delp and Michael Snyder in the Departments of Bioengineering and Genetics. Her primary areas of research are focused on biomedical data science and mobile health; her work includes multi-omics, wearable sensor, and electronic health records integration and digital biomarker discovery. She completed her PhD at Georgia Tech and Emory University and her BS at Johns Hopkins University, both in Biomedical Engineering. Dr. Dunn has worked as a visiting scholar at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and at the National Cardiovascular Research Institute in Madrid, Spain. Her work has been internationally recognized with coverage by media sources including the NIH Director’s Blog, the American Heart Association Science News, Wired, Time, and US News and World Report.