Honoring Atul Butte: A Year of Remembrance and Recommitment to Changing the World Together
Through the voices of family, friends, colleagues, students, and collaborators, this retrospective reflects on the first year after Dr. Atul Butte's passing and the enduring impact of his life and work.
Few modern scientists and entrepreneurs have made as broad an impact - or bridged as many domains - as Atul Butte, MD, PhD (1969-2025). He connected computer science and medicine, academia and industry, research and patient care, helping pioneer the modern field of computational health. He demonstrated how health and medical data could be used in new ways to understand and treat disease. Under his leadership, UCSF and the University of California system became a global hub for artificial intelligence, biomedical data science and precision medicine. In a recent holiday message Dr. Butte shared with his team, “I can’t wait to see how we change the world together,” reflecting his uniquely bold thinking and collaborative spirit. Now, one year after he passed away following a 2.5 year battle with cancer, it is with this positive energy and reflective preparation that the team is continuing to advance his vision.
As Sam Hawgood, MBBS, UCSF Chancellor, affirmed solemnly during the10-year anniversary event last summer of the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute (BCHSI), of which Butte served as director:
“Next, we renew our commitment to the kind of bold, innovative work that Atul exemplified.”
In the past year, Dr. Butte’s colleagues from across the San Francisco Bay Area, the nation and the world, have organized numerous events, recorded interviews, and shared their tributes, honoring his legacy. In doing this, the global community gleaned unique insights into the combination of factors that drove Atul Butte’s ability to innovate. These factors centered around his leadership, but also included the relationships he formed with both people and institutions, as well as the timing of advances in the tech industry and medicine that fueled Dr. Butte’s work.
Dr. Butte laid important groundwork, educating and involving his colleagues each step of the way, thus ensuring succession long before his cancer diagnosis. Marina Sirota, PhD, whom Dr. Butte mentored, and who was later appointed as interim director of the UCSF Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute (BCHSI), reiterated the community’s commitment to his work in this poetic statement about Dr. Butte:
“A call to lead. A call to give. His legacy will grow and live.”
The following provides a line-up and summary of the events and other resources created and shared by Dr. Buttes’s colleagues over the past year. They represent a celebration of the past 10 years of Dr. Butte’s leadership at UCSF, his 30-year career, and a call-to-action to continue to advance in the vision he so clearly laid out. Reflecting Dr. Butte’s optimistic and forward-looking mindset, Vivek Rudrapatna, MD, PhD, director of the UCSF Center for Real World Evidence, shared a provocative question,
“And so the question that I want to ask all of you is, what could this look like in another 10 years?”
We invite you to review the following materials, and to imagine what the next decade of computational health could become - and, if inspired, to support the Dr. Atul Butte Memorial Fund for MPNST Research at UCSF Dr. Atul Butte Memorial Fund for MPNST Research - Giving to UCSF.
Recap: Events 2025-2026 - Commemorating and recommitting
Below, please find a recap of the six events and other resources that were created in the year after Atul Butte passed away. As one speaker noted, “This is Atul Butte,” and this will not be the end. Indeed, there were more than could be documented here. For example, in addition to the events on the West Coast, MIT, Memorial Sloan Kettering and New York University hosted special events dedicated to Atul Butte. To fully understand his impact, we created a broader list of the materials that he created to help share his message as broadly as possible. These include his TEDMED 2012 talk, interviews with the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Wired, and social media posts (he posted 34.8K times in the last 15 years). As you hear the voices of those who shared these materials - those speaking about him and on his behalf over the past year, you will have a better sense of where this exciting field is headed.
Events 2025-2026
- Atul Butte Celebration of Life at Stanford University, June 21, 2025: Dr. Butte’s colleagues opened their doors to celebrate the life of Atul Butte one week after he lost his life to a rare cancer.
- A Decade of Impact: Celebrating Atul Butte and BCHSI at 10 years, UCSF BCHSI, August 19, 2025: The community celebrated the 10-year anniversary of BCHSI, of which he was the founding director, sharing department accomplishments and the unique qualities of its leader for the past 10 years. Please also reference: Key quotes shared by UCSF leaders about Atul Butte’s leadership, UC Tech News, August 21, 2025.
- Building on a Legacy of Actionable Data Science in Medicine, October 31, 2025: Marina Sirota, PhD and Julian Hong, MD, hosted a tribute to Atul Butte AI Seminar to wrap up the academic year. They shared the impact Atul Butte had on the field and on their individual careers.
- Catalyst Rare Disease Program 2025, UCSF Innovation Ventures, June 22, 2025 Dr. Butte’s wife, Tarangini (Gini) Deshpande, PhD, shared the challenges of researching and responding to rare diseases like that of Atul, and her mission to help ensure that systems can pivot more rapidly. Also, that all patients could get access to the care they need.
- Please also visit: Fireside Chat: Atul Butte’s legacy in rare cancer and “scalable privilege”, UCSF Innovation Ventures, March 2, 2026 [RECORDING]
- Pacific Symposium on BioComputing, The Teri E. Klein lecture, “From Data to Knowledge: AI, Clinical Data and Multi-Omics for Precision Health, delivered by Marina Sirota, PhD, and dedicated to Atul Butte, January 4, 2026 The lecture illustrates how Dr. Butte’s pioneering work transformed biomedical data into knowledge that advances precision medicine through AI, multi-omics, open science, mentorship, and entrepreneurship.
- Atul Butte Company Competition at PMWC, hosted by BCHSI, January 6, 2026 BCHSI hosted the inaugural Atul Butte Company Competition at the Precision Medicine World Conference, with 21 semi finalists and five finalists.
- Atul Butte Individual Awards Program honors a UCSF student and UCSF fellow during AI Research Day at UCSF, hosted by BCHSI, March 11, 2026 BCHSI hosted the inaugural Atul Butte Student and Fellows Awards program during AI Research Day at UCSF on June 24, 2026.
Press/Tributes 2025-2026 - Highlights
- Remembering Atul Butte, a Big Data Visionary With a Big Heart, JAMA, October 3, 2025
- Remembering Atul Butte with Marina Sirota, Chirag Patel and Mike Snyder, Mendelspod, August 25, 2025 [RECORDING]
- Remembering Atul Butte, MD, PhD, Office of the Chancellor, Sam Hawgood, June 16, 2025.
- Atulisms - collated by Dexter Hadley
- Kudo board; Atul Janardhan Butte Tribute Wall - Skylawn Memorial Park
A Year of Remembrance: Takeaways
The insights that surfaced over the past year about Atul Butte - tributes shared during events, interviews, personal posts on social media and in group chats and conversations - reveal a perspective on the type of leadership and progress that are unique. Those who know him - and those who know of him - realize that his is a legacy that we will cherish and honor for years to come.
Conversations with Dr. Butte would beget ideas that had the potential to change the world: Dr. Butte’s unique perspective meant that any conversation with him could have enormous repercussions. His wife, Tarangini (Gini) Deshphande, PhD, shared one example that epitomized the demands on his time. He had driven out to help her with a roadside car repair, and, even then, in the dark on a road in Silicon Valley, another car pulled over and they heard someone say, “Is that you, Atul Butte? I’ve been wanting to talk to you!” In retrospect, we now know how limited his time really was. However, he seemed to never waste a minute, reaching out individually, as you will read in the testimonies, and using communications tools like TED and social media, and Congressional Hearings. He ensured that all stakeholders - from patients to investors and regulators - could understand and therefore collaborate.
Innovating and risk-taking: Sam Hawgood, MBBS described Dr. Butte as an important leader and spent three years recruiting him to join UCSF as inaugural director of the new Institute for Computational Health Science. Other university leaders shared how they worked alongside Dr. Butte to innovate - doing things, as one leader pointed out, that were risky because they had never been done before.
Sharing credit and mentoring: Marina Sirota, PhD shared what it was like to be recruited by Atul Butte to come to UCSF. She worked closely with him to learn the science, and also the management of the institute. She shared how he demonstrated, always, that “credit was infinitely divisible,” always providing his protege’s credit and encouraging the growth. Many others, from close colleagues, to those he met only in passing, as well as patients, shared their interactions with Dr. Butte. As one pointed out, he inspired those around him to also go the extra mile to excel, but also to simply show up.
Partnership and positivity: Tarangini (Gini) Deshpande, PhD, shared elements of their life-long partnership. We learned about her role as a life- and a thought-partner, their courtship, and their home that was a source of dinners and other occasions to gather colleagues. A place that became a hub for his community of friends, another family of sorts, which they lovingly called “the Atul Butte mafia.” She shared one of Dr. Butte’s endless one-liners, and one reflective of his positivity. They had tradition that he continued even when he moved to the hospital from their home. To start off everyday, they would clink their coffee mugs and say, “Cheers to another morning!”
