Samuel L. Volchenboum, MD, PHD

University of Chicago – Professor
Pediatric Cancer Data Commons – Director

Dr. Sam Volchenboum is a Professor in the Department of Pediatrics and Associate Chief Research Informatics Officer for the Biological Sciences Division. He is the Associate Dean of Master’s Education and the Informatics Lead for the Institute for Translational Medicine. He is the Program Director for the Clinical Informatics Fellowship Program. His clinical specialty is pediatric hematology/oncology, caring for kids with cancer and diseases of the blood. In addition to caring for patients, Dr. Volchenboum studies ways to harness computers to enable research and foster innovation using large data sets. In addition to his clinical practice, he directs the Data for the Common Good, a research group dedicated to liberating and democratizing data. Their largest project, the Pediatric Cancer Data Commons, is the world’s biggest publicly-available repository for data from children with cancer. Until 2019, Dr. Volchenboum directed the Center for Research Informatics, a 40-person group that supports biological research throughout the division. As director of this center, he oversaw high-performance computing, HIPAA-compliant storage and backup, application development to support clinical trials, development and maintenance of the clinical trials management system, the clinical research data warehouse, data analytics and visualization, and bioinformatics, including high-throughput genomic analyses and machine learning.

Dr. Volchenboum received his PhD in molecular biology and MD from the Mayo Medical School. He completed his residency at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center before going to Boston for his pediatric hematology/oncology fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital. He also completed a fellowship in informatics and received his Master’s in biomedical informatics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.