Gary An

Dr. Gary An is the Green and Gold Professor of Trauma and Critical Care Surgery, Professor of Surgery and Vice-Chairman for Surgical Research in the Department of Surgery at the University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine. He is a clinically active trauma/critical care surgeon who has worked since 1999 on the application of complex systems analysis, agent-based modeling and in silico trials to study sepsis, inflammation, wound healing, host-pathogen interactions and cancer. He is one of the co-founders of Translational Systems Biology, a discipline that promotes the use of multi-scale mechanistic simulation models to cross the Valley of Death of Drug Development. He asserts that the biggest bottleneck in drug development/repurposing is the inability to effectively predict the effect of a molecular manipulation of cellular behavior (e.g. a drug) demonstrated to be effective in pre-clinical studies or with existing clinical usage when it is then applied in a novel clinical context. His work consists of the development of multiscale computer simulations of biological systems and the integration of machine learning and artificial intelligence with such models to represent the individual diversity within clinical populations for the discovery and development of therapeutic control modalities. As many of these methods are applicable to the translation of the digital twin concept from industry to the medical arena, he has been very active in the development of methods for creating mechanism-based medical digital twins to fulfill the promise implied by the use of the term.