Data Officer for the Biological and Physical Sciences Division at NASA Science Mission Directorate
Former Project Manager for NASA Open Science Data Repository - OSDR
Co-lead of the Radiation Biophysics Laboratory
Co-lead of the Artificial Intelligence for Life in Space (AI4LS)
Senior Research Scientist, Code SCR
NASA Ames Research Center

Biography: Dr. Sylvain Costes is currently the Data Officer for the NASA Biological and Physical Sciences Division (BPS) under the Science Mission Directorate (SMD). He is also a senior research scientist co-leading the Ames radiation biophysics laboratory and AI for Life in Space (AI4LS) at NASA Ames Research Centre. Sylvain has spent his career leading multidisciplinary research teams in both academic and government scientific institutions. As a bioimaging specialist and microscopist, he developed at the National Cancer Institute gold standard spatial statistics algorithms to quantify protein-protein interactions. As a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, he was modelling cancer risk for the NASA Human Research Program and developing biomarkers for the DOE Low Dose Programme. As the CEO and co-founder of Exogen Biotechnology Inc., a spin-off startup from LBNL, he played a critical role in the success of the company, providing leadership, vision, and scientific direction. Exogen sought to revolutionise the field of personal diagnostics using DNA integrity as its main biomarker. As the former project manager for Open Science at BPS, he led for 8 years the systems biology research, AI/ML modelling initiative and the software development for two large NASA data systems, the GeneLab Omics repository and the ALSDA repository for physiological data from spaceflight relevant experiments. Sylvain is also one of the NASA Subject Matter Expert for the Data & Innovation Task Force led by the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House, where he pushes forward the work done by NASA on AI, imaging and big data for the Cancer Moonshot.