Peter Tonellato, PhD

Peter J. Tonellato, PhD, is a Professor of Bioinformatics, at the University of Missouri School of Medicine. He applies mathematic, statistic and bioinformatic approaches and methods using the scientific method to create platforms to translate, validate and predict the value of actionable health care data and information — particularly genetic data, information and knowledge — in “best practice” precision medicine. Dr. Tonellato’s work includes the use of “clinical avatars,” digital representations of patients, in the modeling, simulation and prediction of genetic data’s impact on individual and characteristic patient outcome metrics. At present, Dr. Tonellato is conducting a collection of AI-based experiments to pursue new avenues using large language models (LLMs), generative AI and related emerging methodology, technology and resources in pursuit of translational biomedical science.

Dr. Tonellato’s past positions include joint appointments with Harvard Medical School (Director, Laboratory for Personalized Medicine) in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Professor of Bioinformatics at the Zilber School of Public Health, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee . He was founding director of three research centers: At Marquette University (Laboratory for Bioinformatics); the Medical College of Wisconsin (The Bioinformatics Research Center) and at the University of Missouri (Center for Biomedical and Informatics Research) and was the first faculty member recruited for the Center for Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. Previous work includes the creation of the Rat Genome Database (rgd.mcw.edu), the first disease-centric repository of phenotype and genetic data, and the Program in Genomic Applications (pga.mcw.edu) a model organism of human disease phenotype-genotype platform designed to aid the animal model research community to create hypotheses through data mining a massive heterogeneous collection of phenotypes, genetic and microarray expression data from the largest collection of rat and other model organism specialty bred species.