Alex Bloemendal, Ph.D.

Alex Bloemendal is a senior machine learning scientist and institute scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and at the Analytic and Translational Genetics Unit of Massachusetts General Hospital. As a member of the Neale and Lander labs, Bloemendal advises on and develops new methods for human genetic and other large-scale biological data toward a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying complex diseases. Bloemendal co-founded and co-chairs the Broad’s Models, Inference & Algorithms initiative, a widely attended seminar series and community to foster learning and collaboration at the interface of computational biology, mathematical theory, and machine learning. Bloemendal was previously a Simons Fellow in the Department of Mathematics and a research scientist in the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard University. His research in probability and random matrix theory focused on questions of signal and noise in high-dimensional data; he proved a conjecture with wide-reaching applications in fields including population genetics. He also earned a teaching award for an advanced course on probability.

Bloemendal received an Hon. B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Toronto.