Dr. Robert Phair is an MIT electrical engineer who worked at the National Institutes of Health while in the US Public Health Service, earned a PhD in physiology at the University of Michigan, and was a dual professor of Biomedical Engineering and Physiology for 16 years at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine before co-founding, with Ann Chasson, Integrative Bioinformatics Inc, a computational biology consulting firm in 2001. His clients have included distinguished biomedical investigators from both academic research and the pharmaceutical industry. In 2012 he met a neighbor, Marilyn S. who is a ME/CFS patient, and started thinking about this disease. In 2016, through an amazing series of Silicon Valley connections, Dr. Phair volunteered to consult with the ME/CFS research center headed by Dr. Ron Davis at Stanford. Based on genomic data from severely ill ME/CFS patients and biochemical kinetic theory, Dr Phair proposed a metabolic trap theory for the underlying mechanism of ME/CFS and together with an experimental team (Drs. Curt Fischer, Ron Davis, and Julie Wilhelmy, and Sundari Suresh at Stanford) has undertaken an experimental test of this metabolic trap comparing ME/CFS patients to healthy controls. Their work is now funded by the Open Medicine Foundation.
