Mark Bender Gerstein

Education After graduating from Harvard College summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in physics in 1989, Gerstein did a PhD co-supervised by Ruth Lynden-Bell at the University of Cambridge and Cyrus Chothia at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology on liquid simulation and macromolecular conformational change in proteins, graduating in 1993. He then went on to postdoctoral research in bioinformatics at Stanford University from 1993 to 1996 supervised by Nobel-laureate Michael Levitt.

Research Gerstein does research in the field of bioinformatics. This involves applying a range of computational approaches to problems in molecular biology, including data mining and machine learning, molecular simulation, and database design. His research group has a number of foci including annotating the human genome, personal genomics, cancer genomics, building AL/ML tools, analyzing molecular networks, simulating macromolecular motions, and processing biosensor and imaging data. Notable databases and tools that the group has developed include the Database of Macromolecular Motions, which helps analyze molecular networks; PubNet, which analyzes publication networks; PeakSeq, which identifies regions in the genome bound by particular transcription factors; and CNVnator, which categorizes block variants in the genome. Gerstein has also written extensively on how general issues in data science impact on genomics—in particular, in relation to privacy and to structuring scientific communication.

Gerstein's work has been published in peer reviewed scientific journals and non-scientific publications in more popular forums. His work has been highly cited, with an H greater than 200. including on the front page,

Awards and honors In addition to a W. M. Keck Foundation Distinguished Young Scholars award, Gerstein has received awards from the US Navy, IBM, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, and the Donaghue Foundation. He is a Fellow of the AAAS. modENCODE, 1000 Genomes Project, Brainspan, and DOE Kbase. He was made a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) in 2015 and also received an Accomplishments by a Senior Scientist Award from the ISCB in 2023.