Winston Hide, Ph.D., has been at BIDMC since August 2018 and is the new Director of the RNA Precision Medicine Core. He was the Professor and Chair of computational biology, Sheffield Institute of Translational Neuroscience, Department of Neuroscience and Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield in the UK. Previously he was an Associate Professor of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is the founding director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute Center for Stem Cell Bioinformatics.
Dr. Hide is implementing systems biology approaches to RNA medicine – connecting pathways that are involved with the etiology of complex diseases to their regulatory noncoding RNAs.. This strategy can be used to build and implement systems that allow discovery and prioritization of key target genes and processes involved in Alzheimer’s, cancer and drug resistance. Dr. Hide has worked with key industry partners such as Biogen to develop translational pipelines for target prioritization.
Hide performed his post-doctoral training at the University of Texas, Houston, Baylor College of Medicine and the Smithsonian Institution Natural History Museum. He gained industry experience in Silicon Valley at the MasPar Computer Corporation as director of genomics and founded the South African National Bioinformatics Institute where he co-authored the South African Government Biotechnology Strategy. He won the Oppenheimer Foundation Distinguished Sabbatical Research Fellowship in 2007. Dr. Hide was elected into the Academy of Science of South Africa in 2007. He is also the first recipient of the “International Society for Computational Biology Award for Outstanding Achievement”— an award given in recognition of his work for the development of computational biology and bioinformatics in Africa.