Ramana Davuluri will serve as the BMI Interim Chair!

Dr Davuluri honored as SBU Distinguished Professor in 2025

There will be a leadership transition in the Department of Biomedical Informatics (BMI). After 12 years of exceptional service as the Founding Chair of BMI, Dr. Joel Saltz is stepping down to focus on his research and teaching and growth of an AI pathology company built upon patents developed at Stony Brook.

Dr. Ramana Davuluri, Laufer Center affiliate faculty, will serve as the department’s Interim Chair, effective January 5. A world leader in molecular data science, Dr. Davuluri’s research focuses on computational analysis of non-coding genomic regions and isoform-level gene regulation, work that has been continuously funded by National Library of Medicine R01 grants since 2013. Among his pioneering efforts in machine learning-driven biomedical applications, Dr. Davuluri led the team responsible for developing DNABERT, the world’s first genomic large language model (LLM) capable of predicting allele-specific activity based on local nucleotide sequence context, and prioritizing candidate transcription-factor-binding sites that are sensitive to variants at genome-scale.

Ramana was also honored as SBU Distinguished Faculty in 2025.

Congratulations to Ramana on his new role!