Keynote Presentation

Drew Flaada

Director, Emerging Solutions Development, IBM

Drew Flaada is responsible for IBM's System Technology Group (Emerging Solutions) area.  This area is focused on bridging the gap between current base STG products and technologies and emerging high-value opportunities in the market.  This includes new emerging workload directions as well as new solution applications for STG and IBM products.  This is a small, nimble team with a mission to learn from direct interaction with the market and leading adopters to engage, prototype and prove via proof of concept models.  Key focus for this team is to set the direction for and prove STG's role in Cloud computing, and to continue to leverage our long term and deep relationships with clients and across IBM sales, service and Research to improve IBM's position in health care.  Drew founded and continues to manage IBM's long term collaborative relationship with Mayo Clinic as part of these responsibilities.

Drew is a board member for the BioBusiness Alliance of Minnesota, is on the Dean's Advisory Board for the University of Minnesota's Institute of Technology, and is on the University of Minnesota Rochester Biomedical Informatics and Computational Biology program advising faculty and Scientific Advisory Board.  He holds a BSEE degree from North Dakota State University and an MS in Management of Technology from the University of Minnesota. 

Computers for Cures

The explosion of new data in the biosciences is the key to huge new discoveries, but it also creates substantial challenges and the need for new tools and new approaches.  In this talk, Drew Flaada from IBM will discuss that we are positioned in a very unique point in time where we have the tools and technologies to make sense of the tsunami of Information headed our way, but to do so we will need to better leverage cross-disciplinary collaborations and invent new ways to deal with the information effectively.  We truly are on the verge of the "next big thing".