UC San Diego recently announced the hiring of computational biologist Jill Mesirov as associate vice chancellor for computational health sciences, with a primary appointment in the School of Medicine and Moores Cancer Center. But now the CSE department has appointed Mesirov as a faculty-affiliate as well. Until recently, the heavy hitter in academia and industry directed the computational biology and bioinformatics programs at the Broad Institute, a partnership of MIT and Harvard. Before that, she managed computational biology and bioinformatics at IBM.
Mesirov’s own research focuses on applying machine-learning methods to functional genomics data in two main areas: cancer and infectious disease. In cancer, Mesirov’s team is analyzing molecular data to determine the underlying biological mechanisms of specific tumor subtypes and to stratify patients according to their relative risks of relapse. In infectious disease, her team is using functional data to better understand the host-pathogen relationship in malaria, as well as to identify biomarkers for differential diagnosis of viral and bacterial diseases and biomarkers of vaccine efficacy.
In addition to applying computational methods to biomedical research, Mesirov is committed to developing “biologist-friendly” software tools and making them freely accessible to the entire biomedical research community. To this end, her team has developed several popular analysis and visualization software packages, such as Gene Set Enrichment Analysis, GenePattern and the Integrative Genomics Viewer. These tools are used by tens of thousands of investigators worldwide to aid in their research.
Mesirov earned her PhD in mathematics at Brandeis University and was previously associate executive director of the American Mathematical Society (AMS). She is a fellow of AMS, AAAS, and the International Society for Computational Biology. She is a member of the NCI Frederick Advisory Committee and previously served on the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research and the Data and Informatics Working Group of the Advisory Committee to the Director of the NIH.