Sean D. Mooney, PhD

Chief Research Information Officer (CRIO)
UW Medicine
Professor, Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education
University of Washington

Dr. Sean Mooney is the Chief Research Information Officer (CRIO) of UW Medicine and a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education at the University of Washington. As CRIO, he leads the growing Research Information Technology team and provides strategic vision to the development of new platforms that leverage large clinical datasets.

Previous to his CRIO role, he was an Associate Professor and Director of Bioinformatics at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Northern California. His group is known for managing the development of informatic tools for supporting biomedical research. His research interests focus on data science applications in biomedicine, particularly in understanding the underlying molecular causes of inherited genetic diseases and cancer. As an Assistant Professor, he was appointed in Medical and Molecular Genetics at Indiana University School of Medicine and founder and director of the Indiana University School of Medicine Bioinformatics Core.

In 1997, he received his B.S. with Distinction in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He then received his Ph.D. in 2001 at the University of California in San Francisco, and was later an American Cancer Society John Peter Hoffman Fellowship at Stanford University.

He is funded by the National Library of Medicine and other NIH Institutes, mostly in the area of data science and translational medicine. He also has experience leading the construction of communities; he is co-founder of one of the largest nonprofits focusing on biomedical entrepreneurship in the Bay Area, BioE2E, and the Indiana Biomedical Entrepreneur Network. He was part of the team that won the $150k 2000 Garage.com Student Business Plan Competition, where the proposed plan focused on web-based tools for drug discovery research.