ROBERT YANG, PH.D.

GLOBAL HEAD
DATA SCIENCES & PREVENTION BIOMARKERS
WORLD WITHOUT DISEASE ACCELERATOR

As Global Head, Data Sciences & Prevention Biomarkers, World Without Disease Accelerator (WWDA), Robert leads a team focused on developing strategic data science efforts to enable the prevention, interception and cure of the WWDA’s targeted disease areas of focus. This includes identifying relevant cohorts, clinical trial designs, and predictive analytic approaches, as well as developing key biomarker discovery and subsequent validation efforts to drive regulatory and clinical submissions. Robert also helps identify emerging bioinformatic, digital health, machine learning and other data science platforms for investment and integration into the overall WWDA efforts.

Prior to this role, Robert served as Senior Director, Head of Computational Biology, WWDA, where he collaborated broadly with teams to generate and model data-rich human profiling to intercept diseases early on in their development. Before joining Johnson & Johnson in 2019, Robert was the head of predictive analytics within the inflammation and immunology research unit at Celgene. He also served as Director of Computational Biology at AstraZeneca and held roles of increasing responsibility as a scientist at Pfizer.

Robert is working towards a Master of Business Administration at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He received a Ph.D. in computational biology from the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine, and a Bachelor of Science in computer science and bioinformatics from the University of Alberta.