Lior Pachter

Lior Samuel Pachter is a computational biologist. He works at the California Institute of Technology, where he is the Bren Professor of Computational Biology. He has widely varied research interests including genomics, combinatorics, computational geometry, machine learning, scientific computing, and statistics.

Early life and education Pachter was born in Israel and grew up in South Africa. He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology in 1994. and was awarded the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Chair in Computational Biology in 2012. and for a thought experiment he posted on his blog according to which 'the nearest neighbor to the "perfect human"' is from Puerto Rico. This received considerable media attention, and a response was published in Scientific American. He is also known for criticisms of the All-of-us project's use of UMAP to visualize and interpret population genetics data.

Awards and honors In 2017, Pachter was elected a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB).