Warren A. Kibbe, Ph.D., Deputy Director for Data Science and Strategy

As NCI deputy director for data science and strategy, Warren A. Kibbe, Ph.D., FACMI, serves as the senior advisor to the NCI director for all matters related to data science. He provides strategic direction to the NCI Center for Bioinformatics and Information Technology (CBIIT) and manages and oversees all aspects of data science for the institute.

In this role, Dr. Kibbe provides strategic counsel on the development and implementation of key data science initiatives, including the NCI Childhood Cancer Data Initiative, the Cancer Research Data Commons, and the ARPA-H Biomedical Data Fabric Toolbox. He also serves as senior data science liaison to a variety of NIH and other government committees.

Under Dr. Kibbe’s leadership, NCI is applying new approaches to enhance NCI’s data ecosystem, growing a diverse and talented data science workforce and building strategic partnerships to develop and disseminate advanced technologies and methods.

Until June 2024, Dr. Kibbe served as the chief for Translational Biomedical Informatics and vice chair of the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics in the Duke University School of Medicine and as chief data officer for the Duke Cancer Institute. He also served as director of informatics for the Duke Clinical and Translational Science Institute.

Before joining Duke, Dr. Kibbe served as an acting deputy director of NCI from 2016 to 2017 and director of NCI CBIIT from 2013 to 2017. While at NCI, he enhanced the institute’s digital capabilities, including biomedical informatics, scientific management information systems, and computing resources. He also helped establish the Genomic Data Commons and the NCI Cloud Pilots (now Cloud Resources), was instrumental in establishing NCI’s partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy to advance precision oncology and scientific computing, and played a pivotal role in precision medicine and Cancer Moonshot activities, engaging both federal and private sector partners in cancer research.

Dr. Kibbe’s research interests include data representation for clinical trials and improving data interoperability between electronic health records and decision support algorithms. He has been a proponent for open science and open data in biomedical research and helped define the data sharing policy for the Cancer Moonshot. In 2018, Dr. Kibbe was elected a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics.

Dr. Kibbe received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology and completed his postdoctoral fellowship in molecular genetics at the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen, Germany. He received his B.S. in Chemistry from Michigan Technological University.