Saeed Tavazoie is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. He was a professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and the Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton before joining the faculty at Columbia in 2011. His research is focused on understanding cellular adaptation—in particular how cells achieve adaptive gene-expression states, both during short-term physiological adaptation and long-term adaptive evolution. Over the years his laboratory has made important contributions to decoding the genomic elements that drive adaptive transcriptional responses and revealing the genetic basis of adaptation to extreme environments. His laboratory has taken a systems-level approach to understanding cellular behavior by making large-scale global observations and using computational approaches to infer the key underlying components and their organization into regulatory and genetic networks. This strategy has revealed important new phenomena; for example, that microbial organisms can predict changes in their external environments. His research group has made significant headway in tackling these problems through the development of experimental and computational methods that both generate and utilize high-dimensional genomic and phenotypic observations. The long-term goal of his research is to achieve a predictive understanding of biological systems in terms of the structural and dynamical properties of the underlying molecular networks. Professor Tavazoie is the recipient of the 2008 NIH Director's Pioneer Award.