Jill Mesirov, Ph.D.

Associate Vice Chancellor for Computational Health Sciences

As associate vice chancellor for computational health sciences, Jill Mesirov, PhD, is responsible for the overarching strategy for data science and research computing for health sciences at UC San Diego School of Medicine. She is also a professor in the Department of Medicine.

Dr. 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, Dr. 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 joining UC San Diego in 2015, Dr. Mesirov was associate director and chief informatics officer at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, 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, director of research at Thinking Machines Corporation, and has also held positions in the mathematics department at the University of California, Berkeley and served as associate executive director of the American Mathematical Society.

Dr. Mesirov received her BA in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania and earned her MA and PhD in mathematics from Brandeis University.

She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the Association for Women in Mathematics, and the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB).