Dr. Manolis Kellis stands as a preeminent leader in computational biology and genomics at the forefront of precision medicine research. He currently serves as Professor of Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he directs the MIT Computational Biology Group and holds membership in both the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. After completing his doctoral studies at MIT, where he received the prestigious Sprowls award for the best Ph.D. thesis in computer science and the Paris Kanellakis fellowship, Dr. Kellis established himself as a visionary bridging computational approaches with biological discovery. Born in Greece and having studied in France before moving to the United States, he has cultivated a unique interdisciplinary perspective that informs his groundbreaking research across the computational biology landscape.
Professor Kellis has pioneered transformative approaches to understanding the human genome through leadership of major international consortia including the Roadmap Epigenomics project, ENCODE project, and Genotype Tissue-Expression study. His research has made seminal contributions to deciphering the genetic basis of complex diseases such as Alzheimer's, obesity, schizophrenia, cardiac disorders, cancer, and immune conditions through innovative computational frameworks that interpret regulatory genomics and gene circuitry. With over 200 publications cited more than 90,000 times, his work has established new paradigms for understanding disease mechanisms at the molecular level while developing computational tools that have become standard in the field. His integrative analyses of comparative genomics across species, from mammals to flies and yeasts, have provided fundamental insights into evolutionary conservation of regulatory elements that underpin human disease pathways.
As a collaborative leader in the field, Dr. Kellis has shaped the trajectory of computational genomics through his mentorship of numerous researchers and his influential role in major scientific initiatives that have redefined how we approach precision medicine. He has received numerous distinctions including the US Presidential Early Career Award from President Obama, the NSF CAREER award, and the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, recognizing both his scientific excellence and potential for future impact. Currently advancing the integration of machine learning with digital health and disease genomics, his laboratory continues to push the boundaries of computational biology toward more accurate disease prediction and personalized therapeutic approaches. Through his ongoing leadership in next-generation sequencing initiatives and his commitment to training the future generation of computational biologists, Dr. Kellis remains at the vanguard of transforming genomic data into actionable medical insights that will benefit patients worldwide.
