Andrea Califano is the Clyde and Helen Wu Professor of Chemical and Systems Biology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and also holds appointments in the Departments of Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics, Biomedical Informatics, and Medicine. He just stepped down from his positions as Founding Chair of the Department of Systems Biology and Director of the Columbia Genome Center, to take a new role as the President of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub New York.

In 1986, after completing a doctoral thesis in physics at the University of Florence, Italy, Dr. Califano joined the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, where, in 1997, he became program director of the IBM Computational Biology Center. In 2000, he co-founded First Genetic Trust Inc. to pursue translational genomics research. Finally, he joined Columbia in 2003.

Dr. Califano is an internationally recognized pioneer in the reverse engineering of gene regulatory networks and in their analysis to systematically and efficiently identify key tumor checkpoint modules, whose aberrant activity is necessary for tumor viability. This has resulted in several clinical trials, including a very innovative N-of-1 study where patients affected by 14 untreatable, lethal cancers are analyzed on an individual basis to prioritize optimal therapeutic strategies, including both single drugs and drug combinations.

Dr. Califano is very active nationally, serving on numerous editorial and scientific advisory boards, including the Board of Scientific Advisors of the National Cancer Institute, St. Jude Children’s Hospital, The MIT Koch Cancer Center, Cancer Genetics Inc., and Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., among others. He has served as Chair or Co-chair of many international conferences and meetings, including the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR); the RECOMB-ISCB Conference on Regulatory and Systems Genomics, with DREAM Challenges; Keystone Conferences; as well as several special conferences of the AACR on genomics and cancer systems biology.  

He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, a fellow of the AACR, ISCB, AAAS, and IEEE, recipient of the 2015 and 2022 NCI Outstanding Investigator Award (R35), the 2019 Ruth Leff prize in pancreatic cancer research, and the 2023 Alfred G. Knudson prize in Cancer Genetics.

He is also the Co-founder and Chief Scientific Advisor of DarwinHealth Inc.