Mark Gerstein | |
---|---|
Born | Mark Bender Gerstein February 23 |
Citizenship | US |
Alma mater |
|
Awards |
|
Scientific career | |
Fields | Bioinformatics [4] |
Institutions | |
Thesis | Protein recognition: surfaces and conformational change (1993) |
Doctoral advisor | |
Other academic advisors | Michael Levitt (postdoc) |
Doctoral students | Werner Krebs [7] [8] |
Other notable students | Jan O. Korbel |
Website |
Mark Bender Gerstein is an American scientist working in bioinformatics and data science. He is the Albert L. Williams Professor of Biomedical Informatics, professor of molecular biophysics & biochemistry, professor of statistics & data science, and professor of computer science at Yale University. [9] He is also co-director of the Yale Computational Biology and Bioinformatics program. In 2018, Gerstein was named co-director of the Yale Center for Biomedical Data Science. [10]
After graduating from Harvard College summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in physics in 1989, Gerstein did a PhD co-supervised by Ruth Lynden-Bell [6] at the University of Cambridge and Cyrus Chothia at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology on liquid simulation and macromolecular conformational change in proteins, graduating in 1993. [11] He then went on to postdoctoral research in bioinformatics at Stanford University from 1993 to 1996 supervised by Nobel-laureate Michael Levitt.
Gerstein does research in the field of bioinformatics. [4] [12] [13] This involves applying a range of computational approaches to problems in molecular biology, including data mining and machine learning, molecular simulation, and database design. His research group has a number of foci including annotating the human genome, [14] personal genomics, cancer genomics, building AL/ML tools, analyzing molecular networks, simulating macromolecular motions, and processing biosensor and imaging data. Notable databases and tools that the group has developed include the Database of Macromolecular Motions, [7] [8] which categorizes macromolecular conformational change; tYNA, [15] which helps analyze molecular networks; PubNet, [16] which analyzes publication networks; PeakSeq, [17] which identifies regions in the genome bound by particular transcription factors; and CNVnator, [18] which categorizes block variants in the genome. Gerstein has also written extensively on how general issues in data science impact on genomics—in particular, in relation to privacy [19] and to structuring scientific communication. [20]
Gerstein's work has been published in peer reviewed scientific journals [21] [22] [23] and non-scientific publications in more popular forums. [24] His work has been highly cited, with an H greater than 200. [4] He serves on a number of editorial and advisory boards, including those of PLoS Computational Biology , Genome Research , Genome Biology , and Molecular Systems Biology . He has been quoted in the New York Times, [25] [26] [27] including on the front page, [14] and in other major newspapers. [28]
In addition to a W. M. Keck Foundation Distinguished Young Scholars award, [29] Gerstein has received awards from the US Navy, IBM, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, and the Donaghue Foundation. [30] He is a Fellow of the AAAS. [1] Other awards include a Herchel-Smith Scholarship supporting his doctoral work at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. He is a contributor to a number of scientific consortia including ENCODE, [31] modENCODE, [32] [33] [34] 1000 Genomes Project, Brainspan, [35] and DOE Kbase.[ citation needed ] He was made a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) in 2015 [2] and also received an Accomplishments by a Senior Scientist Award from the ISCB in 2023. [3]