Eric Dishman is leaving Intel and going to the National Institutes of Health to take the lead as director of the Precision Medicine Initiative Cohort Program.

In his new role, Dishman is charged with building the longitudinal research study of one million or more U.S. volunteers. The goal is to to expand NIH’s ability to improve health and treat disease through precision medicine.

“Eric brings a wealth of health innovation experience to the PMI effort — as a social scientist and researcher, entrepreneur and business leader, patient and patient advocate, and policy advocate and thought leader,” NIH Director Francis Collins, MD, wrote on the NIH's website, adding that Dishman “comes to NIH with a deep understanding of the initiative, having played a critical role as a member of the PMI Working Group that deliberated intensively for several months last year to develop the design for this audacious study.”  

Collins also noted that Dishman pioneered and co-founded some of the nation’s first and largest research and policy programs focused on telehealth, personal health records, independent living technologies for seniors, and behavioral markers for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes, and heart disease.

Most recently Dishman served as vice president and Intel fellow of Intel’s Health and Life Sciences Group, where he was responsible for global strategy, research, platform development, and policy in key areas, such as health IT, genomics and personalized medicine, consumer wellness, and care coordination technologies.

Dishman spent 15 years leading Intel’s healthcare strategy and  research, including the creation and distribution of Intel’s open platforms and open-source tools to help researchers accelerate scientific discovery ranging from wearable and in-home technologies for movement disorders to big data platforms for cancer genomics.

He also brings his personal experience with precision medicine, having battled a rare form of cancer for 23 years, Dishman became cancer free thanks to early access to precision medicine.