For Josh Denny, BS’98, MD’03, MS’07, a pivotal day during medical school set him on the path that would ultimately lead to his current position as CEO of the All of Us Research Program at the National Institutes of Health. All of Us is gathering health information from more than a million people to advance health research and precision medicine.
After starting his fourth year, Denny felt uncertain about his plans and asked to spend a day with several mentors he admired. With Anderson Spickard III, MD, MS, he saw patients and then helped interview computer programmers for a research project.
Computer science had been a hobby for Denny since middle school; he built computer systems, wrote software and competed on Vanderbilt University’s programming team as an undergraduate (even though his major wasn’t computer science). Spickard’s project piqued his interest.
“I said, ‘I think I could do this job, and it sounds like a lot of fun,’ and that afternoon we hatched the idea for me to take a year off and do that research project,” Denny said.
Leaders at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine were receptive and quickly made it possible for Denny to pursue this plan.
“I feel so fortunate to have been at Vanderbilt, where they were flexible about me doing something unusual. Not everyone would have been open to that,” he said.
With another medical student, Denny built a natural language processing system and website to manage the medical school curriculum. Their product, KnowledgeMap, was adopted by VUSM and nine other schools.
“I came out of that year and knew what I wanted to do and why,” Denny said. “It put me on the trajectory I’ve been on ever since of combining computer science with large-scale data generated by the health care enterprise to make discoveries, improve health care, and make life better.”
During his internal medicine residency at Vanderbilt, Denny developed a system to capture notes from electronic health records (EHRs) and generate research alerts for several life-threatening conditions. He completed a fellowship and master’s degree in biomedical informatics at Vanderbilt and joined the faculty in 2007.
Denny founded and directed the Center for Precision Medicine; led (with Dan Roden, MD, and others) the first studies that used EHRs for genomic discovery; served as the EHR principal investigator for BioVU, the largest single-site DNA biobank with linked EHRs; and helped launch the PREDICT program for adverse drug responses.
He helped draft the plans for what would become the All of Us Research Program and served as principal investigator of the Data and Research Center before joining the NIH as CEO of All of Us in January 2020.
“I tell trainees not to be afraid to do something that could really bend the curve on the rate at which we’re able to discover and make a difference,” Denny said. “It’s now the default to use health records in research, and I think that’s one of the legacies of our work — that we can improve health and health care by using the data.”