Remembering Atul Butte with Marina Sirota, Chirag Patel and Mike Snyder

In this special tribute episode, Mendelspod honors the life and legacy of Dr. Atul Butte (1969-2025), a towering figure in big data and precision medicine who passed away earlier this year. Atul was more than a pioneer in translational bioinformatics—he was a mentor, a builder, and a boundless source of ideas. He sought to “lift all boats in the harbor.”

Joining the conversation are three scientists who worked closely with him and continue to carry forward his vision:

• Dr. Marina Sirota, UCSF professor and acting director of the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute,

• Dr. Chirag Patel, associate professor at Harvard’s Department of Biomedical Informatics,

• Dr. Mike Snyder, chair of genetics at Stanford and longtime collaborator.

Together, they reflect on Atul’s energy, his fearlessness, and his talent for getting to the right question. “Nearly everything I know about doing science I learned from Atul,” says Marina. “He taught us how to ask the right questions—and how to tell the story so others would care.”

Chirag speaks to the connective tissue of Atul’s thinking: “He helped us link previously disconnected fields—gene expression, hospital systems, exposures—and showed us that the real frontier is in the integration.”

Mike recalls Atul’s blunt honesty and unmatched creative force: “He was a fire hydrant of ideas. When others were cautious, he just said it like it was. And often, he was right.”

The episode traces Atul’s influence from his early work mining public gene expression data at Stanford, to building the UCSF clinical data warehouse and leading data-sharing efforts across the entire University of California system. In each role, he remained committed to one core belief: that data should not sit idle—it should lead to insights, tools, and ultimately, better health for patients.

From early exposomics to the new AI-enhanced diagnostics, his legacy stretches across the most urgent frontiers in biomedical research today. As Mike puts it, “There were no boundaries in Atul’s science. He just moved—quickly—into what mattered.”