Professor
Department of Medicine, Division of Genomics and Precision Medicine, University of California San Diego
Jill Mesirov is 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 genomics research program. 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 treatments. In addition, Mesirov is committed to the development of practical, accessible software tools (GenePattern, the Integrative Genomics Viewer, Gene Set Enrichment Analysis and the Molecular Signatures Database) to bring these methods to the general biomedical research community. These tools have supported hundreds of thousands of investigators worldwide. Before moving to UC San Diego in 2015, Mesirov was associate director and chief informatics officer at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, formerly the whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research, where she directed the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Program and was a member of the Cancer Program steering committee. Mesirov is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), and the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) where she formerly served as president. In 2023 she was awarded the Women Breaking Barriers award from the WTA.
