Jill P. Mesirov, Ph.D.

Jill Mesirov is a senior institute fellow of the Broad Institute, and associate vice chancellor for computational health sciences and professor of medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine. As associate vice chancellor, Mesirov is responsible for the overarching strategy for computational health sciences and research computing at UC San Diego School of Medicine. She is a member of the UCSD Moores Cancer Center, where she serves as co-lead for the structural and functional cancer genomics research program.

Mesirov is a computational scientist who has spent many years working in the area of high-performance computing on problems that arise in science, engineering, and business applications. Her research focuses on cancer genomics, applying machine-learning methods to functional data derived from patient tumors. The lab analyzes this molecular data to determine the underlying biological mechanisms of specific tumor subtypes, to stratify patients according to their relative risks of relapse, and to identify candidate compounds for new treatments. In addition, Mesirov is committed to the development of practical, accessible software tools to bring these methods to the general biomedical research community. Her tools support almost 500,000 users worldwide.

Before her current role, Mesirov spent nearly two decades at the Broad Institute and the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research. She was associate director and chief informatics officer at the Broad, where she directed the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Program. She previously served as manager of computational biology and bioinformatics in the Healthcare/Pharmaceutical Solutions Organization and as director of research at Thinking Machines Corporation. She has also held positions in the mathematics department at the University of California at Berkeley and served as associate executive director of the American Mathematical Society.

Mesirov, a former president of the Association for Women in Mathematics, is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Mathematical Society, and the International Society for Computational Biology.

Mesirov received her B.A. in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in mathematics from Brandeis University.

July 2019