Ahmet Zehir, PhD
I am currently the Vice President of Bioinformatics at Natera, leading R&D efforts across all business units.
Before joining Natera, I was the Executive Director, Precision Medicine Innovation at AstraZeneca, in the Precision Medicine and Biosamples function. I led the strategy for diagnostic portfolio development focusing on near-patient blood-based diagnostics for therapy selection, minimal residual disease assessment and early detection of cancer.
In the past, I have led development bioinformatics analysis pipelines, deep-learning based AI algorithms, web applications for analysis of NGS data and biomarker identification combining clinical and genomic data, enabling me to speak to a wide-range of activities in next-generation diagnostics development. I am passionate about increasing the availability and access to molecular diagnostics for patients and strongly believe every cancer patient can and will benefit from genomic profiling.
I was previously an Associate Professor at the Department of Pathology as well as the Director of Clinical Bioinformatics at the Molecular Diagnostics Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. I co-led the development and implementation of several tissue and blood based diagnostic assays (eg: MSK-IMPACT and MSK-ACCESS) and led the building of computational infrastructure that enabled high-throughput data analysis, storage and dissemination.
I am also a member of the Molecular Oncology Committee in College of American Pathologists and am an elected representative of the informatics subdivision of the Association of Molecular Pathology to the Nominating Committee.
