Honoring Atul Butte: A Year of Remembrance and Recommitment to Changing the World Together

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By Laurel Skurko

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 2022 holiday message to his team, Dr. Butte wrote, “I can’t wait to see how we change the world together,” reflecting his uniquely bold thinking and collaborative spirit. Now, one year after his passing following a 2.5-year battle with cancer, his colleagues are continuing to advance his vision with the same positive energy and sense of purpose.

Looking Back—and Looking Forward

As UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood, MBBS, solemnly affirmed during last summer’s 10-year anniversary celebration of the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute (BCHSI), which Dr. Butte directed:

“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, helping ensure continuity 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.”

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?’”

The following provides a summary of the events, along with a list of publications, interviews, and other resources created by Dr. Butte's colleagues over the past year. Together, they celebrate Dr. Butte's decade of leadership at UCSF, his 30-year career spanning many of the nation's leading medical schools, and the vision he laid out for the future.

We invite you to review these materials, imagine what the next decade of computational health could become and, if inspired, support the Dr. Atul Butte Memorial Fund for MPNST Research - Giving to UCSF.

Events and Publications 2025-2026 - Commemorating and recommitting

(Events, publications, interviews, awards, and resources.)

Below, please find a recap of the seven events and other resources that were created in the year after Atul Butte passed away. The events focused on Dr. Butte’s life and legacy, in addition to two new traditions, both of which are awards programs - one honoring companies, and the other individuals. Please scroll below to find hyperlinks with highlights of each of these inaugural Atul Butte awards programs.

As one speaker noted at the first public event honoring Dr. Butte last June, “This is Atul Butte,” and this will not be the end of many conversations and ideas to come. Indeed, there were more events that followed over the course of the last year. In addition to the public events covered in the hyperlinks below on the West Coast, on the East Coast, events dedicated to Dr. Butte were hosted at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK), and New York University (NYU).

As you read and listen to the voices of those speaking about him and on his behalf over the past year, you will have an even better sense of the special person he was and where the new field he created - computational health - and his colleagues in the domain - are heading next to build upon Dr. Butte’s legacy and vision.

Events 2025-2026

Immediate Remembrance Ceremony - June, 2025
1. Atul Butte Celebration of Life at Stanford University, June 21, 2025: Dr. Butte’s family and colleagues opened their doors to celebrate the life of Atul Butte one week after he lost his life to a rare cancer.
Impact review - August, 2025 - January, 2026
1. 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 - Dr. Butte. Please also reference: Key quotes shared by UCSF leaders about Atul Butte’s leadership during the BCHSI @ 10 year event, August 21, 2025.
2. 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.
3. 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.
Building a legacy through a continued vision and celebrating companies and people who embody this - January - March, 2026
1. Atul Butte Company Competition at PMWC, hosted by BCHSI, January 7, 2026: BCHSI hosted the inaugural Atul Butte Company Competition at the Precision Medicine World Conference, with 21 semi finalists and five finalists.
2. Catalyst Rare Disease Program 2025, UCSF Innovation Ventures, February 12, 2026: Dr. Butte’s wife, Tarangini (Gini) Deshpande, PhD, shared the challenges of researching and responding to rare conditions as she and her husband experienced with his particular case. She presented their renewed commitment to “scalable privilege.”
  1. Please also visit: Fireside Chat: Atul Butte’s legacy in rare cancer and “scalable privilege”, UCSF Innovation Ventures, March 2, 2026 [RECORDING]
3. 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 March 11, 2026.

Press/Tributes 2025-2026 - Highlights

Publications and recordings - June - October 2025
Collections of resources - from Dr. Butte’s birth, and ongoing as reflections and documentation continue to grow

A Year of Remembrance: Takeaways

The past year of conversations and gatherings and publications revealed four characteristics unique to Dr. Butte, a visionary:

Turning meetings and conversations into solutions.
Leading bold institutional change.
Sharing credit and creating opportunities.
Building community through deep relationships and optimism.

The events, tributes, and conversations of the past year underscore that Atul Butte's legacy extends far beyond his scientific accomplishments. They reveal a leader who challenged institutions to think bigger, inspired colleagues to act boldly, and created opportunities for others to succeed. He did all of this with boundless enthusiasm for his work and genuine care for the people around him. If there were one word that would capture his persona, it would be “delight.”

His work continues through the people he mentored, the organizations he built, the patients he served, and the community that continues to carry his vision forward.

Tarangini (Gini) Deshpande, PhD, Dr. Butte’s wife and a co-founder of NuMedii, shared a daily ritual during his June 2025 Celebration of Life that captured the strength of their relationship and his enduring optimism. Even after he moved from home to the hospital, they began each morning by clinking their coffee mugs and saying, “Cheers to another morning!”

Deshpande concluded her remarks that day, saying,

"Atul, wherever you are, cheers to another morning."

July 30, 2026