Sylvia Plevritis

Sylvia Katina Plevritis
Nationality	American
Alma mater	The Cooper Union Stanford University
Occupation	Engineer
Known for	Chair of Biomedical Data Science at Stanford University

Sylvia Katina Plevritis is Professor and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Data Science at Stanford University.

Education

Plevritis holds a Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering from The Cooper Union in 1985, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford in 1986, a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford in 1992, and an M.S. in Health Services Research in 1996. She was a NSF fellow for her pre-doctoral work and her dissertation was titled: "Resolution improvements for magnetic resonance spectroscopic images." After her post-doctoral research, she joined Stanford's Department of Radiology as an assistant professor. In 2013, she became a full professor in the department of Radiology and (by courtesy) Management, Science, and Engineering (MS&E). In 2019, she was appointed as professor and chair of Biomedical Data Science at Stanford University.

Research and career

Plevritis's primary research interests lie in population cancer screening outcomes and developing computational techniques to solve problems within the field of cancer systems biology. In 2006, she was the first to demonstrate the cost-effectiveness of adding MRI to mammography for screening BRCA1/2 mutation carriers.

In 2000, Plevritis led the NCI Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Network (CISNET) to understand the effects of screening and adjuvant therapy on breast cancer trends by molecular subtype

In 2004, Plevritis became the Director of the Stanford Center for Cancer Systems Biology (CCSB) and the Director of the Cancer Systems Biology Scholars (CSBS), and the co-Section Chief of the Integrative Biomedical Imaging Informatics at Stanford (IBIIS). Her lab also focuses on developing computational tools to identify heterogeneous molecular features with the tumor microenvironment, such as SPADE, DRUGNEM, PhenoSTAMP, and REMI.

Awards and honors

Plevritis received the Distinguished Investigator for the Academy of Radiology Research and Inaugural Award for Basic Scientist of the Year in the Stanford Radiology Department. She is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE).