Senior Director of Bioinformatics at Millennium Health
Millennium Health
San Diego, California
Penn Whitley is the Senior Director of Bioinformatics at Millennium Health. Whitley’s research focuses on the relationship between Millennium Health’s urine drug test results and related public health indicators, like fatal and non-fatal overdose, demographic features of the clinical population and poly-substance use trends in the community. Whitley has an extensive background in experimental design, biostatistics, supervised and non-supervised machine learning techniques and epidemiological analysis methods. He also has a strong background in genomics analysis methods like gene/protein expression analysis, germline/somatic mutation detection and other next-generation sequencing based assays.
Whitley has been instrumental in the development of Millennium Health’s Emerging Threat Intelligence™ Program, which provides timely drug use information and trends that assist national, regional, and state officials including the Centers for Disease Control and the United States Department of Health and Human Services to assist in their efforts to make a positive impact on our nation’s illicit drug overdose epidemic. Through his efforts, Millennium Health is able to monitor real-time trends in drug use by analyzing over 15 million test results from over 4 million patients representing all 50 states across multiple specialties.
Whitley’s work has been published in numerous journals including JAMA, JAMA Network Open and Addiction and he is a co-author of the annual Millennium Health Signals Report™. He is frequently interviewed by national media outlets.
Thursday, September 4, 2025
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM PST