Sacramento, California - Continuing the state’s efforts to use advanced computing and technology to better understand, treat and prevent disease, Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. today established the Governor’s Advisory Committee on Precision Medicine.

“California is a world leader in medicine and technology. This committee of experts will help us think through how precision medicine can improve health and health care for Californians,” said Governor Brown.

Precision medicine aims to use data-driven tools and analysis to develop new diagnostics, therapies and insights into health and disease. Governor Brown announced the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine (CIAPM) in April 2015 as the first-in-the-nation, state-level effort to fund focused precision medicine projects to improve care and treatment for specific diseases. Since the initial launch, CIAPM has supported several demonstration projects, led by California’s renowned academic and medical institutions, which span the disease spectrum – from childhood cancer to traumatic brain injury, multiple sclerosis and heart disease. To date, California has invested $13 million out of the total $23 million in allocated state funding for precision medicine. Private companies and foundations have also provided additional funding and donated in-kind support directly to the projects.

The committee will advise the Governor’s Office on emerging precision medicine policy issues, such as data sharing and data privacy within and across technology platforms and tools; clinical utility of precision medicine approaches to care; patient and provider engagement and education; and economic impact and sustainability of precision medicine-based treatments. The committee will also provide recommendations on further actions the public and private sectors can take to integrate precision medicine into health care.

The advisory committee members appointed by the Governor encompass the range of expertise necessary in precision medicine: biotechnology, technology, health systems, health disparities, population health, cancer, bioinformatics, ethics, genomics and patient engagement. 

Governor’s Advisory Committee on Precision Medicine Members:

Tomás J. Aragón, MD, MPH, DrPH, 57, of San Francisco, has been appointed to the Governor’s Precision Medicine Advisory Committee. Aragón has been the health officer of the City and County of San Francisco and director of the Population Health Division at the San Francisco Department of Public Health since 2011. He has been an assistant adjunct professor of epidemiology (teaching R programming) at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health since 2004, where he directed a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention training and research center from 2003 to 2010. Aragón earned a Doctor of Medicine degree from Harvard Medical School, a Master of Public Health degree from the Harvard School of Public Health and a Doctor of Public Health degree from the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health. He completed a primary care internal medicine residency and a clinical and research fellowship in infectious diseases at the University of California, San Francisco. Aragón has completed leadership training with the California Health Care Foundation and earned certification in Healthcare Strategic Decision and Risk Management from Stanford University. This position does not require Senate confirmation and there is no compensation.

Atul Butte, MD, PhD, 48, of Menlo Park, has been appointed to the Governor’s Precision Medicine Advisory Committee. Butte has been principal investigator of the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine, director of the Institute for Computational Health Sciences, and Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Francisco since 2015. Butte has been a founder and scientific advisor at NuMedii Inc. since 2009 and at Personalis Inc. since 2011. He held several positions at the Stanford University School of Medicine from 2005 to 2015, including assistant professor, professor of pediatrics and division chief. Butte earned a Doctor of Medicine degree from the Brown University School of Medicine and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in health sciences and technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School. This position does not require Senate confirmation and there is no compensation.

John Carpten, PhD, 52, of Los Angeles, has been appointed to the Governor’s Precision Medicine Advisory Committee. Carpten has been chair of the Department of Translational Genomics at the University of Southern California, Keck School of Medicine and co-director at the University of Southern California Institute for Translational Genomics since 2016. He was director of the Integrated Cancer Genomics Division at the Translational Genomics Research Institute from 2003 to 2015, where he was deputy director of basic sciences from 2012 to 2015. He was a tenure-track investigator at the National Institutes of Health’s National Human Genome Research Institute from 1988 to1994. Carpten earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in molecular, cellular and developmental biology from Ohio State University. This position does not require Senate confirmation and there is no compensation.

Jay Gellert, 63, of Woodland Hills, has been appointed to the Governor’s Precision Medicine Advisory Committee. Gellert was president and chief executive officer at Health Net Inc. from 1998 to 2016. Gellert was president and chief operating officer of Health Systems International Inc. (HSI) from 1996 to 1998 and was a member of the Health Systems International Inc. Board of Directors and chairman of the board for HSI’s principal operating subsidiaries, Health Net and QualMed, from 1996 to 1998. Gellert directed Shattuck Hammond Partners Inc.’s strategic advisory engagements from 1990 to 1996, was president and chief executive officer of the Bay Pacific Health Corporation from 1988 to 1991 and was senior vice president and chief operating officer for California Healthcare System from 1985 to 1988. Gellert is a member of the Ventas, Inc. Board of Directors. He was as chairman of the America’s Health Insurance Plans Board of Directors and served in several positions at the Council for Affordable Quality Healthcare, including co-chair of the Provider Council, chairman of the Administrative Simplification Committee and member of the Board of Directors and the Executive Committee. This position does not require Senate confirmation and there is no compensation.

Kim Goodwin, 46, of Oakland, has been appointed to the Governor’s Precision Medicine Advisory Committee. Goodwin has worked with PatientsLikeMe – a social network, decision-support tool and medical research platform dedicated to connecting patients and analyzing patient-shared data – in various capacities since 2011, including as vice president of product and user experience and as a consultant to guide the development of software tools as well as the patient experiences of longitudinal research. Goodwin is the bestselling author of “Designing for the Digital Age” and speaks around the world about designing human-centered experiences. Goodwin was vice president and general manager at Cooper from 1998 to 2009, where she led consulting projects with Cardinal Health, Varian Medical Systems, Merck Medco, Mayo Clinic and Abbott Labs, as well as consumer brands such as Lexus and NBC. Her 24 years of product design and strategy have included work on electronic health records, personal health records, pharmacy websites, consumer glucose meters and insulin pumps and clinical medical devices. This position does not require Senate confirmation and there is no compensation.

Stephen H. Lockhart, MD, MPhil, PhD, 59, of Oakland, has been appointed to the Governor’s Precision Medicine Advisory Committee. He has been chief medical officer for Sutter Health since 2015, where he has held several positions, including East Bay regional chief medical officer from 2010 to 2015. Lockhart was chief administrative officer at the St Luke’s campus of the California Pacific Medical Center from 2008 to 2010, where he was the medical administrative director of surgical services from 2003 to 2008 and had a long-standing practice of 20 years. A Rhodes Scholar, Lockhart earned a Master of Philosophy degree in economics from Oxford University and Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Philosophy in biostatistics degrees from Cornell University. This position does not require Senate confirmation and there is no compensation.

Kelsey Martin, MD, PhD, 59, of Los Angeles, has been appointed to the Governor’s Precision Medicine Advisory Committee. Martin has served as dean of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles since 2016, where she has served as a faculty member in the departments of Biological Chemistry and Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences since 1999. She served as co-director of the University of California, Los Angeles-California Institute of Technology Medical Scientist Training Program from 2005 to 2013 and was chair of the University of California, Los Angeles Department of Biological Chemistry from 2010 to 2015. Martin is a member of the Cell Editorial Board, Burroughs Wellcome Fund Board of Directors and the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience Board of Directors. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine. After serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1980 to 1982, she earned a Doctor of Medicine degree and Doctor of Philosophy degree in molecular biophysics and biochemistry from Yale University. Martin completed postdoctoral training in neurobiology with Eric Kandel at Columbia University. This position does not require Senate confirmation and there is no compensation.

Mary E. Maxon, PhD, 55, of San Francisco, has been appointed to the Governor’s Precision Medicine Advisory Committee. Maxon has been associate laboratory director for biosciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 2017, where she was biosciences area principal deputy from 2012 to 2017. Maxon is responsible for developing strategies for the use of biosciences to address national-scale challenges in energy, environment, health and biomanufacturing. She has extensive experience in both the public and private sectors. Maxon served as assistant director for biological research at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from 2009 to 2012, where she developed the National Bioeconomy Blueprint. Maxon was director of the Marine Microbiology Program at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation from 2007 to 2009 and held executive and management roles at Cytokinetics as associate director and as leader of the Anti-infective Program from 2001 to 2004. She was scientist II and project lead at Microbia Inc. from 1999 to 2001. Maxon served as deputy vice chair at the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine from 2004 to 2006. She earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in molecular cell biology from the University of California, Berkeley and completed postdoctoral research in biochemistry and genetics at the University of California, San Francisco. This position does not require Senate confirmation and there is no compensation.

Jessica Mega, MD, MPH, 43, of Portola Valley, has been appointed to the Governor’s Precision Medicine Advisory Committee.  Mega has been chief medical officer at Verily Life Sciences since 2015. She led large, international, randomized trials evaluating novel cardiovascular therapies as a senior investigator with the TIMI Study Group and a cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital from 2008 to 2015, and as a faculty member at Harvard Medical School, where she is currently on leave. Mega directed the TIMI Study Group’s Genetics Program from 2011 to 2015, focusing on applications for precision medicine. Her research findings have been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, JAMA and elsewhere.  Mega earned a Doctor of Medicine degree from the Yale School of Medicine and a Master of Public Health degree from the Harvard School of Public Health. She completed an internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a cardiovascular fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital. She has won the Laennec Society, Samuel A. Levine and Douglas P. Zipes awards and is a fellow of the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology. This position does not require Senate confirmation and there is no compensation.

Jill P. Mesirov, PhD, MA, 67, of Solana Beach, has been appointed to the Governor’s Precision Medicine Advisory Committee. Mesirov has been associate vice chancellor for computational health sciences and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine since 2015. Mesirov served as associate director and chief informatics officer at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard – formerly the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research – from 1997 to 2015, where she directed the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Program from 1997 to 2015. She was manager of computational biology and bioinformatics at IBM’s Healthcare-Pharmaceutical Solutions Organization from 1995 to 1997 and director of research at Thinking Machines Corporation from 1985 to 1995. Mesirov was an instructor in the University of California, Berkeley Department of Mathematics from 1974 to 1976, a member of the research staff in the Communications Research Division of the Institute for Defense Analyses from 1976 to 1982 and associate executive director of the American Mathematical Society from 1982 to 1985. She earned Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in mathematics from Brandeis University. This position does not require Senate confirmation and there is no compensation.

Frederick J. Meyers, MD, 66, of Sacramento, has been appointed to the Governor’s Precision Medicine Advisory Committee. Meyers has been associate dean for precision medicine at University of California, Davis Health since 2016, where he has served in several leadership positions since 1992, including chairperson of the Department of Internal Medicine and vice dean of the School of Medicine. He was one of the first in the country to develop the concept of simultaneous care, a system of patient-family centered caring that provides both treatment for advanced cancer using investigational clinical trials as well as intensive palliative care. Meyers has been an active medical oncologist at the University of California, Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center since joining the University of California, Davis faculty in 1982. Meyers earned a Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine. He is a Master of the American College of Physicians. This position does not require Senate confirmation and there is no compensation.

Arnold Milstein, MD, MPH, 71, of San Francisco, has been appointed to the Governor’s Precision Medicine Advisory Committee. Milstein has been a professor of medicine and director of the Clinical Excellence Research Center at Stanford University since 2010. The Center designs and demonstrates scalable health care delivery innovations that provide better care with less health care spending. His research spans positive value outlier analysis, human experience of health care and, in partnership with Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Lab, the development of artificial intelligence systems to assess and support care for medically fragile populations in home and institutional settings. In 1984, Milstein founded a national health care performance improvement firm, National Medical Audit, which he expanded globally after its acquisition by Mercer. He also co-founded three nationally influential public benefit initiatives, the Leapfrog Group in 1998, the Pacific Business Group on Health in 1985 and the Consumer-Purchaser Alliance in 2001. As a member of the congressional Medicare Payment Advisory Commission from 2004 to 2010, he originated two legislative changes to align health care provider revenue with value to patients. He served as chair of the National Academy of Medicine Planning Committee series on improving the efficiency of U.S. care delivery. Milstein earned a Doctor of Medicine degree from the Tufts University School of Medicine and a Master of Public Health degree from the University of California, Berkeley. This position does not require Senate confirmation and there is no compensation.

Hakan Sakul, MS, PhD, 55, of San Diego, has been appointed to the Governor’s Precision Medicine Advisory Committee. Sakul has been vice president of diagnostics at Pfizer since 2016, with responsibility for development of companion diagnostics across Pfizer’s pharmaceutical portfolio. He has held several positions at Pfizer since 2002, including executive director and head of diagnostics for Worldwide R&D; senior director of translational oncology in the Oncology Business Unit; senior director, global head of diagnostics and oncology leads for the Molecular Medicine Group and Clinical R&D; senior director of the Molecular Profiling Group and diagnostics lead for Clinical R&D; and director and site head of the Clinical Pharmacogenomics Group. He led Pfizer’s flagship program in companion diagnostics for Xalkori®, a non-small cell lung cancer drug that received FDA approval in 2011 along with its diagnostics test. He was director of the Human Genetics, Statistical and Pharmacogenetics Department at Parke-Davis Pharmaceuticals from 1998 to 2001. Sakul is a member of the Board of Personalized Medicine Coalition, and author of over 30 referred scientific articles. Sakul earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in quantitative genetics from the University of Minnesota and a Master of Science degree from Ankara University. This position does not require Senate confirmation and there is no compensation.

Sue Siegel, MS, 57, of Menlo Park, has been appointed to the Governor’s Precision Medicine Advisory Committee. Since 2012, Siegel has been chief executive officer of GE Ventures, General Electric’s growth and innovation business comprised of ventures, licensing and new business creation spanning the health care, energy and transportation industries. With over 30 years in the corporate world and in venture capital, and having served as board member, chief executive officer and Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist, she brings diverse perspectives gleaned from her local startup to Fortune 10 multinational experiences. As an institutional venture capitalist at Mohr Davidow Ventures from 2006 to 2012, Siegel led investments in life sciences and health care. As president and member of the board of Affymetrix from1998 to 2005, she delivered multi-billion dollars in shareholder value by scaling the company from a pre-revenue startup to a multi-billion market cap, multi-national genomic leader. Siegel served as a founding member of President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative Working Group. She earned a Master of Science degree in biochemistry from the Boston University School of Medicine. Recognized by the Silicon Valley Business Journal as one of the “100 Women of Influence” and as a multiplier in “Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter,” Siegel is also a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute. This position does not require Senate confirmation and there is no compensation.