Sante Gnerre

Sante Gnerre has been working on whole genome assembly since he joined the Whitehead Institute in 2001, before the Broad Institute was founded. A senior computational biologist in the Genome Assembly and Analysis Group, he builds and applies sophisticated computational methods to combine many short stretches of DNA into an organism’s genome as a coherent whole. 

Gnerre is one of the core developers of ARACHNE and ALLPATHS, algorithms that assemble genomes and help answer biological questions about organisms as small as the bacterium that causes tuberculosis or as large as mammals whose genomes have never been assembled before.

Gnerre received an undergraduate degree in mathematics from the Università degli studi di Roma La Sapienza and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley, where he worked on operator algebras and algebraic approaches to quantum field theory.