Stephen Wong
Houston Methodist, USA
2023

With over three decades of research, product development, and executive leadership experience in healthcare, tech industry, finance, and academic medicine, Wong is the John S. Dunn Presidential Distinguished Endowed Chair in Biomedical Engineering, Founding Chair of Systems Medicine and Bioengineering Department, Director of the T.T. & W.F. Chao Center for BRAIN, Associate Director of Houston Methodist Neal Cancer Center, Houston Methodist Hospital, and Professor of Radiology, Neurosciences, Pathology, and Laboratory Medicine, Cornell University, among other titles.

Stephen pioneered the field of medical image informatics in the early 1990s, contributed to the development of the first hospital-wide picture archiving and communication system in the United States—for all UCSF hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area. While directing the HCNR Center for Bioinformatics at Harvard Medical School in the 2000s, Dr. Wong pioneered the integration of high content screening and systems biology to accelerate drug discovery. Concurrently, he created the Functional and Molecular Imaging Center at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and developed their first cyclotron and MRI/PET/CT/optical research imaging core facilities.  He has served in executive leadership roles in major technology-driven companies including HP, Bell Labs, Philips Healthcare, where he headed integrative clinical product development departments and directed the implementation of then the largest radiology information system in Europe and the development of object-oriented electronic medical record; and Charles Schwab, where his group produced one of the world’s first and largest electronic trading platforms. His laboratory at Houston Methodist investigates molecular mechanisms, diagnosis, and therapeutics of cancer and neurological disorders, with research findings leading to several clinical trials in drug repositioning, cancer screening, stroke triage, image-guided therapy, and digital therapeutics.

Stephen serves as the Editor-in-Chief for the Computerized Medical Imaging and Graphics (the first journal in the field of medical imaging analysis). He is a Fellow of IEEE, AIMBE, AMIA, and AAIA, and licensed professional engineer (PE) in the U.S. He received senior executive education from Stanford University, MIT, and Columbia University and taught at Harvard University, Stanford University, UCSF, and UC Berkeley, and now teach at Texas A&M University, Weill Cornell Medicine, and Houston Methodist.