Sage Bionetworks Names Computational Biology Pioneer Lawrence Hunter to Board of Directors

Sage Bionetworks named Lawrence Hunter, a University of Chicago pediatrics professor and early leader in computational biology, to its Board of Directors on October 20, 2026. EIN Presswire reported the appointment. Hunter joins the nonprofit's existing board, which includes Stephen H. Friend, Eric Schadt, Luca Foschini, Jennifer Goldsack, Brian J. Fox, Carole Goble and Andrea Varsavsky.

Hunter's Move to the Sage Bionetworks Board

Hunter is a professor of pediatrics at the University of Chicago. He moved to the university in 2024 after 23 years at the University of Colorado. He founded the International Society for Computational Biology in 1997 and served as its president until 2000. He also founded two field conferences, Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology and the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing.

Hunter's recent research focuses on biomedical knowledge graphs and how they can work alongside large language models. He was senior author on the paper describing PheKnowLator, an open-source knowledge graph ecosystem for the life sciences. He co-authored "Desiderata for a biomedical knowledge network," which came out of the NIH Knowledge Graph Working Group. His group built an "ignorance base," a system for mining what the scientific literature says is not yet known.

Luca Foschini, PhD, president and CEO of Sage Bionetworks, said Hunter helped create the field Sage works in and that his research addresses how to keep model outputs tied to what is known and verifiable. Sage Bionetworks said Hunter has a long relationship with the organization and will help it continue to thrive.

Sage Bionetworks' Recent Funding and Platform Work

According to akta.pro company records, Sage Bionetworks co-led with NYU Langone Health the NAMs Data Hub and Coordination Center under NIH's Complement-ARIE program, funded by a $25 million NIH Common Fund award over five years to standardize data from New Approach Methodologies as alternatives to animal testing. The same records show Sage launched SynapseChat in December 2024, an AI-powered conversational search feature enabling researchers to query, summarize, and cross-link datasets across the roughly 3.3 PB Synapse platform while maintaining HIPAA compliance. Sage expanded its Board of Directors in July 2024 with Jennifer C. Goldsack, Digital Medicine Society CEO, and Brian J. Fox, Bash shell author and open-source technologist.

Earlier Sage Bionetworks Contracts

In September 2026, Sage Bionetworks received an ARPA-H contract to build Twin-TECC, a platform evaluating ICU digital twins against FDA guidance, with funding totaling up to $18.3 million over five years, EIN Presswire reported. In August 2026, Sage Bionetworks said it will build the Rare Disease Data Commons for ARPA-H's RAPID program, receiving up to $28 million over 4.5 years, to unify fragmented rare disease data, establish a benchmark dataset, and run AI challenges, according to EIN Presswire.