Personalized medicine across disciplines and without borders

Vural ozdemir speaks to Hannah Wilson, Commissioning Editor. Vural ozdemir began his career as a medical doctor in Turkey in 1990, as a scientist at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto (ON, Canada), where he obtained his MSc and PhD in clinical pharmacology (1998), and subsequently completed a 4-year postdoctoral fellowship in personalized medicine with the late Werner Kalow, a founding pioneer in the field of pharmacogenetics. ozdemir contributed to the conception and development of the repeated drug administration (RDA) method as a novel way of measuring pharmacological heritability, pharmacogenetics of psychiatric drugs and studying the clinical role of CYP2D6 genetic variations for endogenous neurotransmitter metabolism in the human brain. Recognizing that scientific knowledge is a product of both technology and social systems that often remain unaccounted for (e.g., human values, distribution of power and human agency, immigration, racial disparities, socioeconomic class and equity, among other factors), ozdemir discovered the literature in the field of science and technology studies, a rich scholarly enquiry that asks fundamental questions and challenges assumptions regarding the backstage of technoscience, situates technology within its political context and makes hitherto unseen connections that frame science in ways that enable robust, responsible and sustainable innovation. From 2008 to 2012, ozdemir was awarded a mid-career science and society' fellowship in order to retool as an independent faculty and senior scientist in science and technology studies, conducting research on research and examining his own trade - pharmacogenetics science - as an insider on the outside. Recently, ozdemir was awarded a senior career support from the Scientific and Tehnological Research Council of Turkey, is an Associate Professor of both Communications and Human Genetics at the Faculty of Communications and serves as an advisor to the Rector for International Technology and Innovation Policy, Gaziantep University in Turkey. He is also a Visiting Professor of Global Health at Amrita University in Kerala, India, and cofounder of the Data-Enabled Life Sciences Alliance (DELSA Global), an open innovation and knowledge translation platform in Seattle (WA, USA). ozdemir was named as coinventor of 12 World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) indexed patents in personalized medicine and has authored more than 130 peer-reviewed articles and chapters on the translation of omics technologies into public health action, global technology governance, diagnostics innovation strategy, history of bioethics and the ethics of bioethics. Science peace corps' and microgrants for big data' are two new knowledge translation and science communication concepts developed by ozdemir for the global governance of biotechnology. He is Editor-in-Chief of OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology, published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. (NY, USA).