Dr. Mesirov is Associate Vice Chancellor for Computational Health Sciences and Professor of Medicine (Division of Medical Genetics) at UC San Diego School of Medicine and Moores Cancer Center, and a Senior Institute Fellow at the Broad Institute. She is a pioneering computational scientist who has translated high performance machine learning methods into widely used tools (including GenePattern, Gene Set Enrichment Analysis, and IGV), globally democratizing cancer genomics and functional data analysis for over half a million researchers worldwide.
Mesirov’s research applies system-level informatics to stratify tumor subtypes, uncover relapse risk mechanisms, and prioritize therapeutic targets using integrated molecular datasets. Her work bridges machine learning, genomic profiling, and infectious disease biomarker discovery.
Over her long career, she has held senior roles at the Broad and Whitehead Institutes, IBM, and Thinking Machines Corporation, and was President of the Association for Women in Mathematics (1989–1991). She has published extensively, with over 130 peer-reviewed works. Dr. Mesirov is also a Fellow of AAAS (1996), ISCB (2012), AMS (2012), and AW M (2017).