Samuel Volchenboum

Samuel L. Volchenboum, MD, PhD, MS, is an expert in pediatric cancers and blood disorders. He has a special interest in treating children with neuroblastoma, a tumor of the sympathetic nervous system.

In addition to caring for patients, Dr. Volchenboum studies ways to harness computers to enable research and foster innovation using large data sets. He directs the development of the International Neuroblastoma Risk Group Database project, which connects international patient data with external information such as genomic data and tissue availability. The Center he runs provides computational support for the Biological Sciences Division at the University of Chicago, including high-performance computing, applications development, bioinformatics, and access to the clinical research data warehouse.

Samuel Volchenboum is a physician who treats pediatric cancers and blood disorders, with a specialization in treating children with neuroblastoma and other pediatric solid tumors. His research explores the use of computation to define diseases in greater detail. His discoveries in genetics could lead to personalized and targeted therapies with better outcomes and fewer side effects in children as well as adults.

As a researcher and physician, Volchenboum serves as an assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics. His research methodologies include using proteomics to study pediatric solid tumors and building tools for high-throughput mass spectrometry data analysis.

His lab has a number of outside collaborations, including an international multi-institutional effort to establish a database for neuroblastoma patient data. He also works with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to study the effects of TrkA and TrkB signaling in neuroblastoma cell lines.

Volchenboum is the of the BSD Center for Research Informatics. He also is the associate director of the Institute for Translational Medicine, Associate Chief Research Informatics Officer, and a fellow and faculty member of the Computation Institute.

Volchenboum has been on the UChicago faculty since 2007, and in 2009 he was named a St. Baldrick's Foundation Scholar. Volchenboum received his PhD in molecular biology and MD from the Mayo Medical School. He completed his residency at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center before going to Boston for his pediatric hematology/oncology fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital. He also completed a fellowship in informatics and received his Master’s in biomedical informatics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.