Dmitriy Sonkin, PhD (Working group leader)

National Cancer Institute

Dr. Sonkin is an NCI scientist in the Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis, Biometric Research Program, Computational and Systems Biology Branch. He is a co-chair of the Knowledge Curation and Interpretation Standards (KCIS) working group of the Variant Interpretation for Cancer Consortium (VICC, a GA4GH driver project). He is also co-chair of ClinGen Somatic/Germline variant curation working group. Prior to coming to the NIH in 2015 he worked at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR) located in Cambridge Massachusetts. At NIBR he worked on variety of research projects, one of which was identification and validation of targets for cancer therapy, including targets for Antibody Drug Conjugate (ADC) and Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cell (CART) therapies. Also, at NIBR he worked on predicting response to targeted cancer therapies based on tumor genomics for number of research projects, including Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia (CCLE). Prior to joining NIBR in 2008 he worked at Harvard Medical School Partners Center for Genetics and Genomics (HPCGG) located in Cambridge Massachusetts. At HPCGG he helped to developed pipeline for the Clinical Laboratory of Molecular Medicine to decrease the amount of manual review needed for analysis of Sanger sequencing chromatograms. Also, at HPCGG he analyzed microarray and sequencing studies, including data from Solexa (later known as Illumina) Next Generation sequencers which was at the time a brand-new technology and required creation of new complex analysis pipelines.