Karen Stark, Ph.D.

Dr. Stark is a computational biologist who holds five patents in machine learning and draws upon triple expertise in mathematics, software development and life science to pioneer analytics and data visualizations.

Holding a Ph.D. from Yale University and having conducted postdoctoral research in the Center for Cancer Research at MIT, she is a frequent ad hoc reviewer of grants and contracts for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases within the NIH, in the areas of analytics, bioinformatics, systems biology and computational biology. She has over 25 years of project management, database design, systems analysis, software development, mathematics, statistics, and 17 years at the bench in omics, molecular biology, neural development, cell biology, and behavioral science.

Dr. Stark founded Digital Infuzion’s Data Science Services and led the development of Digital Infuzion’s artificial intelligence tool, GeneBrain. She was the principal investigator for the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense’s Biosurveillance Ecosystem project that emphasized intuitive visualizations to make sophisticated mathematical analysis of complex data interpretable to those with no mathematical training. Prior to Digital Infuzion, she founded the computational biology department at Linden Bioscience for multi-omics analysis. Additionally, she headed research in gene expression at Alphagene, the first commercial provider of spotted cDNA microarrays.